nto
his chair at the desk, while the girl busied herself with a new and
commendable activity in her task of setting the immaculate room to
rights.

Both seemed to realise without turning around that one more of their too
brief interviews had been unceremoniously cut short.

The man whose advent caused the curtailment of the promise's sealing was
as foreign looking as the room itself. Dapper, dressed in a sort of
elaborate carelessness, his figure alone carried with it an air of
assurance that Hartmann always found almost as irritating as the man's
gracefully exaggerated manner and speech. His blonde hair was brushed
back from a high, narrow forehead. A turned-up moustache and a
close-trimmed and pointed Van Dyke beard added to the foreign aspect.

The newcomer took in the scene with a glance that apparently grasped
none of its details. He nodded curtly to Hartmann, then crossed to where
the girl was dusting.

CHAPTER II

THE HEIR

"Hello, Kitty," he said. "Good-morning."

"Good-morning, Frederik," responded the girl, and started toward the
stairs.

But the man intercepted her. Catching her playfully by the arm he tried
to draw her toward him.

"You're pretty as a June rose to-day," he laughed.

Hartmann, instinctively, had half-risen from his chair. The girl, noting
his movement and the frown gathering on his face, checked her impulse to
retort, quietly disengaged herself from the newcomer's familiar grasp,
and ran up the short stair flight that led into the gallery.

In no way offended, the man glanced after her with another short laugh,
then turned to Hartmann.

"Where's my uncle?" he asked.

Hartmann looked up with elaborate slowness from the notes he was making
of the newly opened mail. His eyes at last rested on the dapper figure
before him, with the impersonal, faintly irritated gaze one might bestow
on a yelping puppy.

"Mr. Grimm is outside," he answered. "He's watching my father spray the
plum trees. The black knot's getting ahead of us this year."

"I wonder," grumbled Frederik, lounging across to the window, "if it's
possible once a year to ask a simple question of any inmate of this
cursedly dreary old place without getting a botanical answer."

"That's what we are here for--those of us that work," said Hartmann,
returning to his note making.

"Work, work, work!" mocked Frederik. "When I inherit my beloved uncle's
fortune, I shall buy up all the dictionaries and have that wretc