"Up and ready to spout; and so is father."
He said this because his father was approaching them, and all three of them laughed courteously at the sally. When Wallingford, cleansed and dressed, came downstairs again, he was more jovially cordial than usual, even for him, and made his guests, as he always did, feel how incomplete the evening would have been without his presence; but after they had all gone he withdrew into the library, where, after she had seen to the setting of her house to rights, his wife joined him. He had taken a bottle of wine in with him, but it stood upon the table unopened, while he sat close by it, holding an unlighted cigar and gazing thoughtfully out of the window. She hesitated in the doorway and he looked up slowly.
"Come in, Fanny," he invited her soberly. "Sit down!" and opening the wine he poured out a glass for her.
She sipped at it and set it back upon the table.
"What's the matter, Jim?" she asked solicitously. "Don't you feel well? Aren't things going right?"
"Never felt better in my life," he declared, "and things never panned out half so good. I guess I'm tired. I never pulled off anything near so big a game, but my end of the boom is over. To-day I sold the last piece of property I own, except this. Of course, I've been too wise to sell any of the ground that was given to me for shops and depots and terminal stations. I'd lay myself open to the law if I did that; and the law and I are real chummy. I'm particular about the law. But I am rid of everything else, and, in the five months we have been here, I have cleaned up over two hundred thousand dollars."
"The most money we ever did have!" she exclaimed. "Is that in addition to what we had when we came here?"
"All velvet," he assured her. "We have considerably over three hundred thousand now, all told; a full third of a million!"
"I knew you could do it if you only set yourself to it," she declared. "And all of that fortune, for it is a fortune, Jim, was made in a clean, honorable way."
He looked up at her, puzzled. Could it be possible that she did not understand?