“Well,” confessed Bobby a trifle reluctantly, “this very proposition was presented to him several times, I believe, but he always declined to go into it.”
“Then,” decided Agnes, so quickly and emphatically that it startled him, “don’t touch it!”
“Oh, but you see,” he reminded her, “the governor couldn’t go into everything that was offered him, and to this plan he never urged any objection but that he had too many irons in the fire.”
“I wouldn’t touch it,” declared Agnes, and that was her final word in the matter, despite all his arguments. If John Burnit had declined to go into it, no matter for what reason, the plan was not worth considering.
CHAPTER VIII
BOBBY SUCCEEDS IN SNAPPING A BARGAIN FROM UNDER SILAS TRIMMER’S NOSE
Still undecided, but carrying seriously the thought that he must overlook no opportunity if he was to prove himself the successful man that his father had so ardently wished him to become, Bobby dropped into the Idlers’ Club for lunch, where Nick Allstyne and Payne Winthrop hailed him as one returned from the dead.
“Just the chap,” declared Nick. “Stan Rogers has written me that I’m to scrape the regular crowd together and come up to his new Canadian lodge for a hunt. Stag affair, you know. Real sport and no pink-coat pretense.”
“Sorry, Nick,” said Bobby, pluming himself a trifle upon his steadfastness to duty, “but I know what Stan’s stag affairs are like. It would mean two weeks at least, and I could not spare that much time from the city.”
“Business again!” groaned Payne in mock dismay. “This grasping greed for gain is blighting the most promising young men of our avaricious country. Why, it’s positively shameful, Bobby, when your father must have left you over three million.”