What arguments Edward Raymer used to convince his mother and sister that Griswold as a participating partner was better than Jasper Grierson figuring as the man in possession, the Wahaskan gossips were unable to guess. But the fact remained. Within a week from the day when Raymer, angrily jubilant, had rescued his imperilled stock, it was pretty generally known that Kenneth Griswold, the writing-man, had become the fourth member in the close corporation of the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works, and Wahaska was eagerly earning Broffin's contemptuous characterization of it by discussing the business affair in all its possible and probable bearings upon the Raymers, the Griersons, and the newly elected directory of the Pineboro Railroad.
Of all this buzzing of the gossip bees the person most acutely concerned heard little or nothing. Griswold's intimation to Raymer that he wished only to be a silent partner had been made in good faith; and beyond a few purely perfunctory visits to the plant across the railroad tracks, made because Raymer had insisted that he go over the books and learn for himself the exact condition of the business into which he had put his money, Griswold took no more than an advisory part in the industrial activities. To Raymer's urgings there was always the same answer: the writing fit was on him and he had no time.
Taken for what it was worth, the writing excuse was sufficiently valid. In the fallow period of the slow convalescence the imaginative field had grown fertile for the plough, and a new book, borrowing nothing from the old save the sociological background, was already under way. Digging deeply in the inspirational field, Griswold speedily became oblivious to most of his encompassments; to all of them, indeed, save those which bore directly upon the beloved task. Among these, he counted the frequent afternoon visits to Mereside, and the scarcely less frequent evenings spent in the Farnham home. Again in harmony with the later prefigurings, he was using each of the young women as a foil for the other in the outworking of his plot; and he welcomed it as a sign of growth that the story in its new form was acquiring verisimilitude and becoming gratefully, and at times, he persuaded himself, quite vividly, human.
When he got well into the swing of it and was turning out a chapter every three or four days, he fell easily into the habit of slipping the last instalment into his pocket when he went to Mereside. Margery Grierson was adding generously to his immense obligation to her; hoping only to find a friendly listener, he found a helpful collaborator. More than once, when his own imagination was at fault, she was able to open new vistas in the humanities for him, apparently drawing upon a reserve of intuitive conclusions compared with which his own hard-bought store of experimental knowledge was almost puerile.
"I wish you would tell me the secret of your marvellous cleverness!" he exclaimed, on one of the June afternoons when he had been reading to her in the cool half-shadows of the Mereside library. "You are only a child in years: how can you know with such miraculous certainty what other people would think and do under conditions about which you can't possibly know anything experimentally? It's beyond me!"
"There are many things beyond you yet, dear boy; many, many things," was her laughing rejoinder; from which it will be inferred that the episode in the Farmers' and Merchants' burglar-proof had become an episode forgotten—or at least forgiven. "You know men—a little; but when it comes to the women ... well, if I didn't keep continually nagging at you, your two heroines—with neither of whom you are really in love—would degenerate into rag dolls. They would, actually."
"That's true; I can see it clearly enough when you point it out," he admitted, putting his craftsman pride underfoot, as he was always obliged to do in these talks with her. "I should be discouraged if you didn't keep on telling me that the story, as a story, is good."
"It is good; it is a big story," she asserted, with kindling enthusiasm. "The plot, so far as you have gone with it, is fine; and that is where you leave me away behind. I don't see how you could ever think it out. And the character-drawing is fine, too, some of it. Your Fleming is as far beyond me as your Fidelia seems to be beyond you."
"Fleming is human in every drop of his blood," he boasted.
"I don't doubt it for a moment; all the little ear-marks of humanity are there, and I know in reason that he must be a type. But I have never met the man himself; and I am sure I shall be scared silly if I ever do meet him. Think of being shut up in any little corner of the world with a man who has convinced himself that he can commit any crime in the calendar so long as he believes the particular one he chooses isn't a crime!"