“As it happens, I don’t have to look for one. I leave for Chicago on the eleven-fifteen to-night, and my job is waiting for me.”
“Fine!” was the friendly approval. “Is it a secret?”
“Not at all. I’m going to work for the Grillage Engineering Company; an assistant engineer’s billet on a bridge construction job up in Wisconsin. There is a reason why I shouldn’t take the job, and a still stronger reason why I can’t refuse.”
“That’s capital!” said Oswald, ignoring the qualifying part of the announcement. “You are lucky—or I guess you are. They say Mr. Eben Grillage can dig his profit out of the shrewdest contract that was ever drawn and never turn a hair. But as an engineer in the field, you won’t have anything to do with that part of it.”
David glanced up quickly with a little frown coming and going between the honest eyes.
“Again I’ll have to ask you to break it off, Bert. Mr. Grillage is my father’s friend.”
“Of course he is; I forgot for the moment,” was the placative reply. “I shouldn’t have repeated the gossip—which is only gossip, after all. I suppose you remember his daughter Vinnie, as a little girl, don’t you?”
“Very well, indeed,” said David, with his eyes on his plate.
“She has grown up to be a raving, tearing, heart-smashing beauty,” the lawyer went on, entirely unmindful of the sudden change in his table-mate. “I met her in Indianapolis last summer when I was there on a business trip. She was stopping with friends, and she gave me exactly five minutes by the watch—which was all the time she could spare; all the time a dozen other fellows would let her spare. Somebody told me she was, or is, going to marry an English title.”
“That is gossip, too,” said David, still looking down.