"A colossal mistake. Your only objection to me as a son-in-law was on financial grounds. Show me, if you can, any young man you could have picked out as a husband for your daughter, who within a few months could have saved your company three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. No, Mr. Hurd, you've done me a very great injustice. And now, I'm going to ask two things of you."
"And what are they?" inquired Mr. Hurd.
"The first is your order for rewriting the schedule on the traction properties. We'll take up the second when we've finished that."
John M. Hurd gave a half hitch in his chair, and turned his face toward the window, the very casement out of which he had gazed on the day when the fate of Mr. Wilkinson's scheme was first decided. Thoughtfully he looked out and down the busy street. His visitor, by way of gently stimulating his reverie, laid the companies' loss drafts within an inch of his unmoving fingers. Unconsciously those fingers, which had through the long years acquired an inalienable tendency toward the acquisition of legal tender in whatever form proffered—those fingers slowly, almost automatically, but irrevocably, closed upon the little packet.
It seemed as though, from the contact, a soothing hint of balsam-laden pines, of comfort and satisfaction for the soul, must have proceeded from those oblong papers. Charlie, keenly watching, beheld the stony countenance in front of him, as if permeated by some ineffable warmth, stir and become human. The miracle of Galatea was worked in this face before the very gaze of him who had dispensed the beneficent influence. The grim lines around the mouth lost their inflexible rigor; and slowly, unwillingly, almost shamefacedly there stole into the hard old visage the hint, the wraith, the shadow of a smile.
Wise in his generation, Wilkinson left the work to the magic and sovereign forces now at play; he did not risk marring the alchemy by a single word. After a moment which seemed an hour he found himself once more confronted by the direct observation of his step-uncle.
"You can have your trolley schedule," said John M. Hurd. "You are certainly entitled to it. What else you want I dare say I can guess. . . . Suppose you bring Isabel up to Beacon Street this afternoon to take tea with her mother—and me."
If Mr. Wilkinson cut a pigeon wing in the outer office, it was only the scion of South Framingham whose amazement is recorded. John M. Hurd, still smiling faintly, sat reflectively eyeing the little pile of checks which his visitor had left, until at last he rang for his cashier.
"Endorse these and have them deposited immediately, Mr. Walsh," he said.
Meanwhile the telephone wires were buzzing under Mr. Wilkinson's energetic advertisement of the latest society note.