“Straight telegram, paid,” the clerk repeated perfunctorily, and swept the message under the counter. The sending of the telegram gave Grace a gratifying sense of kinship with the larger world which Trenton’s love had revealed to her. She found happiness all the afternoon in wondering just what he would be doing and how he would look when the message reached him. She wrote that night the longest letter she had yet written him. She thought often of what Irene had said about wanting to be loved. To be loved, in the great way that Miss Reynolds had said was the only way that counted,—this had become the great desire of her heart. Old restraints and inherited moral inhibitions still resisted her impulse to fashion her life and give herself as she pleased. She meant to be very sure of Trenton and even more sure of her own heart before committing herself further. She was not, she kept assuring herself, an ordinary or common type. She dropped into her letter several literary allusions and a few French phrases with a school girl’s pride in her erudition. There were times when Grace was very young!
Trenton’s next letter reported his complete recovery. He was working hard to make up for lost time, but would leave for the West as soon as possible and hoped to spend Christmas in Indianapolis. Incidentally he had business there in which she might be able to assist him. This was further explained in a typewritten enclosure which he asked her to deliver to her father. He warned her that the inquiry might lead to nothing, but there were certain patents held in Stephen Durland’s name which he wished to investigate.
“The name Durland,” he wrote, “gave me a distinctly pleasant shock when the memorandum turned up on my desk in the routine of the office. There may be a place where I can use some of your father’s ideas; but in this business we’re all pessimists. I appoint you my agent and representative on the spot. Don’t let your father dispose of any of the patents described in my letter till we can have an interview.”
She made the noon hour the occasion for one of her picnic lunches with her father in his work shop.
He looked up from a model he was tinkering and greeted her with his usual, “That you, Grace?”
“Very much Grace!” she answered, tossing her packages on the bench. “What are you on today—perpetual motion or a scheme for harnessing the sun?”
“A fool thing a man left here the other day; wanted me to tell him why it didn’t work. It doesn’t work because there’s no sense in it.”
As he began to explain why the device was impracticable she snatched off his hat and flinging it aside with a dramatic flourish handed him a sandwich.
“Don’t waste your time on such foolishness; we’re only interested in machines that work!”
She sprang upon the bench and produced Trenton’s letter.