“But Mr. Boyce is a very young man, and you scarcely know him,” objected Ethel.
“He was strongly recommended to me by Judge Wendover,” replied the mother.
“And pray who recommended Judge Wendover?” asked Kate, with latent sarcasm.
“Why, he was bom in the same town with me!” said Mrs. Minster, as if no answer could be more sufficient. “My grandfather Douw Mauverensen’s sister married a Wendover.”
“But about the bonds,” pursued the eldest daughter. “What amount of money do they represent?”
“Four hundred thousand dollars.”
The girls opened their eyes at this, and their mother hastened to add: “But it really isn’t very important, when you come to look at it. It is only what Judge Wendover calls making one hand wash the other. The money raised on the bonds will put the Thessaly Company on its feet, and so then that will pay dividends, and so we will get back the interest, and more too. The bonds we can buy back whenever we choose. I managed that, because when Judge Wendover said the bonds would be perfectly good, I said, ‘If they are so good, why don’t you take them yourself?’ And he seemed struck with that and said he would. They didn’t get much the best of me there!”
Somehow this did not seem very clear to Kate. “If he had the money to take the bonds, what was the need of any bonds at all?” she asked. “Why didn’t he buy this machinery himself?”
“It wouldn’t have been regular; there was some legal obstacle in the way,” the mother replied. “He explained it to me, but I didn’t quite catch it. At all events, there had to be bonds. Even he couldn’t see any way ont of that.”
“Well, I hope it is all right,” said Kate, and the conversation lapsed.