he blustering, big-hearted painter who was gypsying it down at
the Duchess's. But as the days passed she never mentioned Hunt again;
not even to ask where he was or what he was doing. She was adhering very
strictly to the remark she had made the night Larry came here: "I don't
want to know until he wants me to know." And so Hunt remained the same
incomplete picture to Larry; the painter was indubitably at home in such
surroundings as these, and he was at home as a roistering, hard-working
vagabond at the Duchess's--but all the vast spaces between were utterly
blank, except for the sketchy remarks Hunt had made concerning himself.

Larry had guessed that hurt pride was the reason for Hunt's vanishment
from the world which had known him. But he knew hurt pride was not Miss
Sherwood's motive for making no inquiries. Anger? No. Jealousy? No.
Some insult offered her? No. Larry went through the category of ordinary
motives, of possible happenings; but he could find none which would
reconcile her very keen and kindly feeling for Hunt with her abstinence
from all inquiries.

From his first day in his sanctuary Larry spent long hours every day
over the accounts and documents Miss Sherwood had put in his hands. They
were indeed a tangle. Originally the Sherwood estate had consisted
of solid real-estate holdings. But now that Larry had before him
the records of holdings and of various dealings he learned that the
character of the Sherwood fortune had altered greatly. Miss Sherwood's
father had neglected the care of this sober business in favor of
speculative investment and even outright gambling in stocks; and
Dick, possessing this strain of his father, and lacking his father's
experience, had and was speculating even more wildly.

Larry had followed the market since he had been in a broker's office
almost ten years earlier, so he knew what stock values had been and
had some idea of what they were now. The records, and some of the stock
Larry found in the safe, recalled the reputation of the elder Sherwood.
He had been known as a spirited, daring man who would buy anything or
sell anything; he had been several times victimized by sharp traders,
some of these out-and-out confidence men. Studying these old records
Larry remembered that the elder Sherwood a dozen years before had lost
a hundred thousand in a mining deal which Old Jimmie Carlisle had helped
manipulate.

Larry found hundreds and hundreds of thousands of stock in the