She stopped a moment, and thrust a folded paper into his hand. "That's yours, but Anthea must never see it. Charley didn't know I had it, and I meant to keep it in case Merril got rich again; but I don't want it now. Please destroy it, Jimmy."
Jimmy glanced at the paper, and his expression changed when he saw that it was the engineer's confession; but he laid his hand on his sister's arm and pressed it, for he understood what the fact that she had parted with that document signified. Then Leeson, who was a few paces in front of them, turned and pointed to a big steamer with a tier of white deck-houses lying out in the Inlet.
"The boat's waiting at the landing, and we'll go off," he said. "There's a kind of wedding-lunch ready on board her."
Jimmy said they had purposed going straight to the house he had commissioned Jordan to take for him, but the latter laughed, and Leeson chuckled dryly.
"We held a meeting over the question, and fixed it up that the house you wanted hadn't quite tone enough for the man who's to be Commodore of the Shasta fleet very soon," he said. "That's why we decided to put you into my big one on the rise. Guess there's not a prettier house around this city, but it has never been really lived in. I'm out most of every day, and only want two rooms. Now, there's no use protesting; it's all fixed ready, and you're going right in."
He turned, and touched Anthea's arm. "You'll stand by me. You can't afford to have your husband kick against the man with the most money in the Shasta Company."
Jimmy's protests were very feeble. It had been his one trouble that Anthea would have to live in a very different fashion from the one she had been accustomed to, and he was relieved when she thanked the old man.
Leeson smiled at her in a very kindly fashion. "Well," he said, "I've been lonely for the last eight years since the boy who should have had that house went down with my smartest boat, and I want to feel that there's somebody under the same roof with me who will keep me from growing too hard and old."
Then he stopped, and chuckled in his usual dry manner. "I was going to make Jordan the proposition—only I got to thinking and my nerve failed me. Guess I made my money hard in the free sealing days when we had trouble with everybody all the time, but I felt I'd sooner not offend Mrs. Jordan, and I might do it if I didn't fix things just as she told me. She's a clever woman—but I don't want to have her on my trail."
Eleanor only glanced at him in whimsical reproach, and they moved on, laughing, toward the waiting boat.