“Why did he make you that promise, Gail?” demanded her uncle, turning on her suddenly, with a physical motion so much like her father’s that she was startled.
“He wants me to marry him,” faltered Gail.
Aunt Grace sat down by the other side of Gail.
“Have you accepted him, dear?” she asked.
There was a lump in Gail’s throat. She could not answer!
“She’ll never marry him with my consent!” stormed her Uncle Jim. “Nor with Miles’s! The fellow’s an unscrupulous scoundrel! He’s made of cruelty from his toes to his hair! He stops at nothing! He even robbed Market Square Church of six million dollars!”
Gail’s head suddenly went up in startled inquiry. She wanted to still defend Allison; but she dreaded what was to come.
“We wouldn’t sell him Vedder Court at his price; so he took it from us at six million less than he originally offered. He did that by a trick, too.”
All three women looked up at him in breathless interest.
“He had the city condemn Vedder Court,” went on Sargent. “If he had condemned it outright for the Municipal Transportation Company, he would have had to pay us about the amount of his original offer; but his own private and particular devil put the idea into his head that the Vedder Court tenements should be torn down anyhow, for the good of the public! So he had the buildings condemned first, destroying six million dollars’ worth of value; then he had the ground condemned! Tim Corman probably got about a million dollars for that humanitarian job!”