"Don't take it so hard! You'll live it down!"
"What was I to Silas Gyde?" murmured Jack.
"I don't know the whole story. Mr. Gyde took no man on earth into his confidence. I judge, though, that he was an unsuccessful suitor for your mother. The affair must have cut deep, for he never married."
"Eighty million!" murmured Jack, unable to grasp the idea of such a sum.
"Nearly five million a year; four hundred thousand a month; say thirteen thousand a day."
The figures had a convincing ring. The color stole back into Jack's cheeks, and a delicious warmth crept around his heart. He had no great difficulty in believing his good fortune, because he had already pictured it to himself in fancy. His first thought was of Kate. "I can buy her anything now!"
For a moment or two he found nothing to say. Delamare seeing his eyes become dreamy, smiled again. "Spending it already, I see!"
Jack blushed and descended to earth. "Please tell me all about it," he said.
"I'll tell you what I know. As I said, I was not in Mr. Gyde's full confidence—no man was. Indeed I knew him but slightly. He was a good customer of the bank, but he did everything in his own peculiar way. He rented a large vault from us, and had the locks changed under his own supervision. I believe he kept the major part of his securities there, but he may have other vaults too.
"Some five years or so ago, he came to me saying he wanted to rent a small lock box in our vaults, the kind that we get ten dollars a year for. He was so insistent upon the necessity for secrecy that we allowed him to have it under an assumed name. Another officer of the bank and myself were taken into the secret. Mr. Gyde left me a duplicate key to this box with instructions to open it if ever a day passed without my hearing from him. I believe he used to visit the box himself to make sure that I had not been tampering with it, but his peculiarities were so well known, one didn't mind that in him.