"That's what I meant. And it was going to be your own money?"
"Yes."
He met her gaze with a smile of mingled triumph and admiration.
"It was a close call, and you'll never know how near I came to falling down," he said. "It was a fearful temptation."
The pencilled brows went up with a little arch of interrogation between them.
"A temptation? Why do you call it that?"
Bartrow was slowly coming to his own in the matter of unconstraint. "If you had ever dabbled in mineral, you'd know. When a fellow gets in about so deep, he'd foreclose the mortgage on his grandfather's farm to get money to go on with. I didn't read between the lines in your letter. I thought the Philadelphia man was some friend of yours who was interested in a general way, and the temptation to fall on his neck and weep was almost too much for me."
"You still call it a temptation."
"It was just that, and nothing less. I had the toughest kind of a fight with myself before I could say no, and mean it."
"But why should you say no? You believe in the Little Myriad, don't you?"