"She's pure gold when you dig down through the little top layer of harmless scheming for the social Grand-Viziership," he told himself, tingling with the exultant thrills of the discoverer of buried treasure. "If all Wahaska doesn't open its doors to her after this, it'll sure earn what's coming to it."
True to her latest characterization of herself, Margery had a nod and a pleasant smile for the young men behind the brass grilles as she passed on her way to the president's room in the rear. She found her father at his desk, thoughtfully munching the unburned half of one of the huge cigars, and named her errand.
"I want a safety-deposit box big enough to hold this," she said briefly, exhibiting the paper-wrapped packet.
Jasper Grierson, deeply immersed in a matter of business to which he had given the better part of the forenoon, replied without looking up: "Go and tell Murray; he'll fix you out," and it was not until after she had gone that it occurred to him to wonder what use she was going to make of a private box in the safety vault—a wonder that had lost itself in a multiplicity of other things before he saw her again.
For a week after his unmarked arrival in Wahaska, the castaway in the upper room at Mereside made hard work of it, giving the good little doctor with the kindly eyes and the straight-line Puritan lips a rather anxious fight to gain the upper hand of the still unnamed malady.
During the week there were many callers at the lake-fronting mansion; some coming frankly to welcome the returned house-mistress, others to make the welcoming an excuse for finding out the particulars in the castaway episode. But neither faith nor good works seemed to have any effect on the rebellious minority, and at the end of the week Raymer once more had the pleasure of lifting Miss Grierson from the high trap at the door of the Farmers' and Merchants' Bank, and of exchanging a few words with her before she went in to see her father.
As on any other business day, President Grierson was solidly planted in his heavy arm-chair before a desk well littered with work. He nodded absently to his daughter as she entered, and knowing that the nod meant that he would come to the surface of things—her surface—when he could, she turned aside to the window and waited.
Though she had seen him develop day by day in less than three of the thirty-odd years of his Western exile, her father offered a constant succession of surprises to her. When she opened the door to retrospection, which was not often, she remembered that the man who had stumbled upon the rich quartz vein in Yellow Dog Gulch could scarcely sign his name legibly to the papers recording his claim; that in those days there was no prophecy of the ambitious present in the man, half drunkard and half outlaw, whose name in the Yellow Dog district had been a synonym for—but these were unpleasant memories, and Margery rarely indulged them.
Just now she put them aside by turning her back upon the window and taking credit for the tasteful and luxurious appointments of the private office, with its soft-piled rug and heavy mahogany furnishings. Her father was careless of such things; totally indifferent to them in business hours; but she saw to it that his surroundings kept pace with the march of prosperity. Here in Wahaska, as elsewhere, a little judicious display counted for much, even if there were a few bigoted persons who affected to despise it.