"I think you know without being told—or you will know when I say that to-day was the day when the big debt to the bank became due. I am afraid we have finally lost the 'Little Susan.' That is one of the worries and the other I've been trying to call silly. I don't know what has become of father—as if he weren't old enough to go and come without telling me every move he makes!"
"Your father isn't at home?" gasped Brouillard.
"No; he hasn't been here since nine o'clock this morning. Murray Grislow saw him going into the Metropole about one o'clock, but nobody that I have been able to reach by 'phone seems to have seen him after that."
"I can bring the record down to two o'clock," was the quick reply. "He ate with me at Bongras's, and afterward I walked with him as far as the bank. And I can cure part of the first worry—all of it, in fact; he had the money to take up the Cortwright notes, and when I left him he was on his way to Hardwick's window to do it."
"He had the money? Where did he get it?"
Brouillard put his back against a porch post, a change of position which kept the light of the street electric from shining squarely upon his face.
"It has been another of the get-rich-quick days in Mirapolis," he said evasively. "Somebody told me that the corner opposite Poodles's was bought and sold three times within a single hour and that each time the price was doubled."
"And you are trying to tell me that father made a hundred thousand dollars just in those few hours by buying and selling Mirapolis lots? You don't know him, Victor. He is totally lacking the trading gift. He has often said that he couldn't stand on a street corner and sell twenty-dollar gold pieces at nineteen dollars apiece—nobody would buy of him."
"Nevertheless, I am telling you that he had the money to take up those notes," Brouillard insisted. "I saw it in his hands."
She left him abruptly and began to pace back and forth on the porch, with her hands behind her, an imitative trait unconsciously copying her father in his moments of stress. When she stopped she stood fairly in the beam of the street light. The violet eyes were misty, and in the low voice there was a note of deeper trouble.