"Yes. Fifteen thousand dollars."
John frowned. "I wish he hadn't bothered you about that. He is such a nervous, irritating little man. He could just as well have come to me, and you wouldn't have been annoyed."
"I didn't mind. And you needn't either, John. I got in touch with Bates and he is taking care of the whole matter. We can both dismiss it from our minds." Emerson Bates was the Dornings' very efficient and very expensive lawyer. Mr. Dorning smiled reminiscently. "Rosner was always such a fretty, worried type, as you say. I tried diplomatically to dissuade him from attempting a big undertaking such as he is in for. He hasn't the temperament or the business ability to swing it. If anything goes wrong, he is liable to suffer a nervous breakdown or worse. This failure in London nearly did for him for a while, I understand. And he tells me he married over there, and they have two small children. Such men should be kept out of large business undertakings. They aren't built for it."
"And yet you advanced him fifteen thousand dollars," John smiled affectionately at his father. He knew this white-haired man's weakness for helping others. He had inherited it himself.
"Well, Rosner was with me quite a while at the shop. He is getting along in years now, and he is fearfully anxious to make a success. We old chaps have to stick together, you know."
As Alice appeared in the broad doorway, announcing dinner, John Dorning put a tender arm about his father to assist him from his chair. There was something touching and ennobling in the scene to Rodrigo, watching them, and something a little pathetic too.
CHAPTER VII
When Rodrigo reached his office the next morning, his exasperatingly efficient spinster secretary had long since opened his mail and had the letters, neatly denuded of their envelopes, upon his desk. That is, all but one. She had evidently decided that this one was of too private a nature for her to tamper with. The envelope was pale pink and exuded a faint feminine scent. It was addressed in the scrawly, infantile hand of Sophie Binner and was postmarked Montreal. Rodrigo fished it out of the pile of business communications, among which it stood out like a chorus girl at a Quaker meeting, and, breaking the seal, read it:
Dearest Rod,