Mr. Deering was once more a business man. “What did Ranscomb buy at?” he asked curtly.
“Seven and a quarter.”
“Then you needn’t kick Ned! The Ranscombs put through their deal and Mizpah’s gone to forty!”
Hood rejoined them, and they talked till daylight. He told them much of himself. The responsibility of a great fortune had not appealed to him; he had been honest in his preference for the vagabond life, but realized, now that he was well launched upon middle age, that it was only becoming and decent for him to alter his ways. Billy’s liking for him, that had struggled so rebelliously against impatience and distrust, warmed to the heartiest admiration.
“Of course I knew you were married,” the senior Deering remarked for Billy’s enlightenment, “and now and then I got glimpses of you in your gypsy life. Your wife had a fortune of her own—she was one of Augustus Davis’s daughters—so of course she hasn’t suffered from your foolishness.”
“My wife shared my tastes; there has never been the slightest trouble between us. Our daughter is just like us. But now Mrs. Tyringham thinks we ought to settle down and be respectable.”
“I knew your wife and daughter had come home. I had got that far,” Mr. Deering resumed. “And after I began to suspect that you and Hood were the same person I put my own daughter into your house on the Dempster road as a spy to watch for you.”
“My wife wasn’t fooled for a minute,” Hood chuckled. “We were having our last fling before we settled down for the rest of our days. We all have the same weakness for a springtime lark: my wife, my daughter, and I.”
Billy ran his hands through his hair. “Pierrette! Pierrette is your daughter!”
“Certainly,” replied Hood; “and Columbine, the dearest woman in the world, is my wife, and Pantaloon my father-in-law. In my affair with you there was only one coincidence: everything else was planned. It was Pierrette, whose real name is Roberta—Bobby for short, when we’re not playing a game of some sort—Bobby really did lift your suitcase by mistake. And it was stowed away in Cassowary’s car when I came to your house intending to return it. But when I saw that you needed diversion I decided to give you a whirl. It was an easy matter for Cassowary to move the suitcase to the bungalow, where you found it. I steered you to the house on purpose to see how you and Bobby would hit it off. The result seems to have been satisfactory!”