“It was complete, Poictiers; an up-to-date, finished product of modern high-finance methods. The Vanderburg crowd got father against the wall in the steel merger, and—well, you’ll know how bad it was when I tell you that it killed him. The doctors said pneumonia, but it was really a Wall Street sand-bagging. He didn’t leave a will; and when we gathered up the fragments afterward, we knew why he didn’t; there wasn’t enough to make it worth while. So, you see, the Ocoee is a last resort, for me.”
Carfax was musing again.
“Yet you are going to many a comfortable little gold mine,” he said, after a time.
“Uncle Byrd’s Colorado millions?—yes. And I am rather sorry; for Elizabeth’s sake, not less than for my own. We were engaged before Uncle Byrd died, and he knew it. It was entirely unnecessary—not to say cruel—for him to leave his fortune to Elizabeth on the condition that she shouldn’t change her mind and marry somebody else, and to me in case she did.”
Carfax did not comment upon the cruelty. He was perfectly familiar with the terms of Mr. Byrd Tregarvon’s will. Instead, he said: “You hear from Elizabeth regularly, I suppose?”
“Oh, certainly. Duty is always written out in large capitals for Elizabeth.”
“And you think she writes to you from a sense of duty?”
“We needn’t put it just that way. But I have no doubt she conceives it to be her duty to a man she has promised to marry.”
“You shouldn’t say such things as that, Vance, not even to me,” corrected the other man quickly.
“I know I shouldn’t. It is only one of the many ways in which Uncle Byrd’s millions corrode things. Without meaning to, the old uncle stood matters upon an entirely different, and most difficult, footing for us two. We meant to marry: we had passed our word to the various members of the clan that we were going to marry; and the clan was glad because it had always counted upon that outcome for us. So far as a man up a tree might discern, it was a perfectly free choice for both of us.”