“I know,” he offered; “in a rambling old house with a groved lawn. It has a box-bordered carriage drive, and a big, pillared veranda fronting the west.”
“Yes; when have you ever seen Westwood House?”
“Perhaps I haven’t seen it; perhaps I am only imagining how it ought to look. But the name ‘Westwood’ is familiar enough. It is written all over the Ocoee maps.”
Her smile, on any other lips, would have had more than a hint of bitterness in it.
“I suppose we ought to be proud of the distinction. The printing of the home name on the maps was the only return my father ever had for what he did for Mr. Parker. But, of course, you know all about that.”
“Not so much as I’d like to know. I have understood that your father was a heavy investor in the original Ocoee company, and that Parker contrived to give him the hot end of things in the reorganization.”
“It is all true.”
“It makes me feel as if I had been caught stealing sheep,” he volunteered. “Ethically, I suppose the Ocoee doesn’t belong to me at all, though I hope it is clear to everybody that neither I nor my father had any part in the crookedness. So far as that goes, my father never knew anything about the early history of the mine; and neither did I before I came down here. How does your father feel about it?”
It did not strike him at the moment as being particularly significant that she did not answer the question categorically.
“Those things are all past and gone,” she said half-absently. And then: “I wish you might meet my father; you and Mr. Carfax.”