“I am very sorry.”
Her feminine tact told her it would be better to say nothing more about it. The square jaw of Stanley Downs, as well as the fighting glint in his gray eyes, suggested that he would deal with the misfortune in his own way, and that he would not ask for sympathy from any one.
“I shall have to communicate with my uncle, Mr. Burwin, in New York,” he remarked, after a short pause, during which it struck him that he should make some acknowledgment of her expression of sorrow. “The money was his, and I was taking it to our bank.”
“Burwin & Son, you know, Helen,” interjected Varron.
“I did think I would go directly to New York,” continued Stanley. “But I think I will call him up on ‘long distance,’ and stay here till I find out whether I can save any of the bills.”
“Nothing much can be done to-day, I should say,” observed Varron. “You will have to get dredging machinery from somewhere—Poughkeepsie, probably. That will take at least twenty-four hours, by the time it is all set up.”
“Won’t you be my father’s guest for to-night, Mr. Downs?” asked Helen. “He will be pleased to see you, especially when he hears that you have saved his daughter’s life. I am a great deal of a nuisance to him, but he thinks something of me, nevertheless.”
“Well, I should say he does!” laughed Clay Varron. “Helen makes him do just what she wants. I don’t think anybody else on earth could do that.”
The end of it all was that Stanley Downs accepted Helen Ranfelt’s invitation, and about six o’clock that evening Clay Varron drove his big car under the porte-cochère of Lawrence K. Ranfelt’s castlelike mansion on a mountaintop, to let Stanley jump down to help out the young girl who had been by his side during the ride up from the lake, the glimmer of which could be made out miles below.