“No,” Brainard admitted. “But I don’t mind now.”
“You oughtn’t to, really, seeing that it is my own name by baptism.”
They both laughed at this. Melody danced about the small room, woke up the new Boston bull, and made him dance with her. She was once more the child Brainard had first known at the opening of the theater.
“You’ll have to squelch that woman who’s trying to take poor mama’s place,” she remarked, in a pause.
“Of course I shall attend to that at once—and all other business until I can straighten out your property and hand it over to you clear of tangles.”
“What do you mean? Do you think I am going to take your old mine?” Melody fairly shouted. “It’s yours, yours, all yours! You won the first stake with your nerve, and you made the rest of it. And you’ll keep it, too, my friend—at least, most of it. Perhaps some day, when I get the fool-bug in my head, and want a company of my own, I’ll come around and call on you for a couple of hundred thousand.”
Brainard looked at the girl almost severely.
“All the property is yours, of course. Krutzmacht meant it so. Your name was the last word on his lips. I have been merely your guardian. It would be impossible for me to keep it now. You can see that it would be entirely different from what it has been while you were only a name to me.”
“I see what you are,” she replied slowly. “The honestest, most generous, most unselfish of men—and the foolishest! Come, let’s stop this swapping of compliments like a couple of children—‘You take it, George!’ ‘No, you take it, Edith!’ . . . So old Pap Krutz wanted me to have his money when he was dying! I suppose he thought to make it square for what he put mother and me through. He treated us like peons!”
Brainard laughed.