“You’re trumps, all of you,” the host declared, gratefully. “I knew I could depend on you, but to have your assurance takes a weight off my mind all the same. I’d feel infernally helpless, alone on the job. With you chaps standing by, I know we’ll win out. As for starting, well, time is important—there’s a bit less than a month now left to us. I’ve looked up trains. There’s a good one that starts in the afternoon. I know it’s awfully short notice, but, if you could manage to make it tomorrow, why—” he halted doubtfully, to stare at his friends.
“Tomorrow it is!” boomed Billy Walker; and the others echoed agreement.
CHAPTER II
THE SECRETARY
IN THE performance of her secretarial duties, May Thurston duly drummed on her machine the remarkable letter to Saxe Temple, in which the old miser made known his intended disposition of a golden treasury. Because she possessed an excellent New England conscience, the girl maintained silence, despite the urgings of a feminine desire to share the secret. This reticence on her part was the more admirable inasmuch as, just at this time, her affections were becoming strongly engaged by a suitor.
Hartley Masters, the man in the case, was a civil engineer employed in the neighborhood with a survey for an electric road. On one occasion, he had stopped at Abernethey’s cottage for a glass of water from the well. The master of the house was absent at the time, but the secretary was present, and, by some chance, out of doors that pleasant May morning. Conventions seemed rather absurd in that remote region. The young engineer admired the charming face and slender form, and hastened to engage her in conversation. She responded without reluctance, rather with pleasure in this diversion from the monotony of her days. Afterward, a considerable intimacy developed between the two. May Thurston had much of her time free, and Masters contrived so to arrange his work as to take full advantage of her leisure. That his heart was touched seriously may be doubted, but his courtship lacked nothing in the evidences of intensity and sincerity. He made a deep impression on the girl, who was both ingenuous and tender. Masters was the first to whom she had given more than the most casual heed, and, almost at the outset, she found her affections engaged. She regarded him as astonishingly handsome—as, in truth, he was—in a melodramatic fashion of his own, with huge dark eyes, long-lashed and glowing, a sweep of black mustache, and thick, clustering hair, which was always artistically tousled. In fact, the whole appearance of the man was blatantly artistic, in the bohemian acceptation of the word, and he was scrupulous to wear on all occasions a loose bow of silk at his throat. He was tall, too, and broad enough, but there was too much slope to his shoulders, his neck was too long, his head bulked too large for harmony. His voice was agreeable, his manners were suave, quickened by a jauntiness, which was perhaps assumed to harmonize with the insouciant air of the cravat. May Thurston, who had read her Byron, thought of him as The Corsair, and her heart fluttered.
It is easily understood that the secretary’s keeping silence concerning her employer’s remarkable testamentary plans showed her the possessor of some strength of character, as well as a sense of honor. She even managed to keep her own counsel after Masters openly declared his love, and besought her to become his wife—at some vague time in the future, when he should have arrived at a position of independence. She yielded readily to his ardor, and had plighted troth, all a-tremble with maidenly confusion and womanly raptures. Then, a few days later, Abernethey died. She felt now that she was at liberty to reveal the circumstances of the will to her lover. As they strolled on the lake shore, the evening of the day after the miser’s death, May told the story, to which Masters listened with absorbed attention.
“Mad as a hatter!” he ejaculated, contemptuously, as the girl brought her narrative to a close. Yet, though his voice was mocking, there was manifest in his expression an eagerness that puzzled the girl.
She would not permit his comment to go unrebuked: