to enter business upon some
designs of a new engine stolen by a discharged workman.

"How did all these people find out that I have two hundred and fifty
thousand dollars to invest?" impatiently demanded Bobby, after he had
refused the allurements of a patent-medicine scheme, the last of that
morning's lot.

There followed a dense silence, in the midst of which old Johnson
looked up from the book in which he was entering a long, long list of
items on the wrong side of the profit and loss account, and jerked his
lean thumb angrily in the direction of Applerod.

"Ask him," he said.

Chubby-faced old Applerod, excessively meek of spirit to-day, suffered
a moment of embarrassment under the accusing eyes of young Burnit.

"The newspapers, sir," he admitted, twisting uncomfortably in his
swivel chair. "The reporters were here yesterday afternoon with the
idea that since you haven't announced any future plans, the failure of
our real estate scheme--_my_ real estate scheme," he corrected in
response to a snort and a glare from Johnson--"had left you penniless.
Of course I wasn't going to let them go away with that impression, so
I told them that you had another two hundred and fifty thousand
dollars to invest, with probably more to follow, if necessary."

"And of course," groaned Bobby, "it is all in print, with ingenious
trimmings."

From a drawer in his desk Johnson quietly drew copies of the morning
papers, each one folded carefully to an article in which, under wide
variations of embarrassing head-lines, the facts of Bobby's latest
frittering of his father's good money were once more facetiously, even
gleefully, set forth and embellished, with added humorous speculations
as to how he would probably cremate his new fund. Bobby was about to
turn into his own room to absorb his humiliation in secret when
Applerod hesitantly stopped him.

"Another thing, sir," he said. "Mr. Frank L. Sharpe called up early
this morning to know when he would find you in, and I took the liberty
of telling him that you would very likely be here at ten o'clock."

Bobby frowned slightly at the mention of that name. He knew of Sharpe
vaguely as a man whose private life had been so scandalous that
society had ceased to shudder at his name--it simply refused to hear
it; a man who had even secured advancement by obligingly divorcing his
first wife so that the notorious Sam Stone could marry her.

"What did he want?" he asked none too graciou