o find out if anybody is after his money. And Penelope?
Haven't I seen Penelope many a night stepping into her carriage--don't
you think I can trust her to look higher than that?"

I could not change him, though we argued until dawn came. Then we
walked together, in the gray of the early morning, from the poor
quarter where he lived to Miss Minion's, a house that had grown in my
eyes, by contrast, palatial. The street was still deserted, and
standing by my door I made a last appeal. But he shook his head.

"Davy, can't you understand?" he said, as he took my hand in parting.
"I admit that I have been a failure up to date, but Rufus and Penelope
are the last people in the world that I want to know it, and I'll trust
you to be discreet. Some day it may be best to tell them, but at
present, no. Silence, David; I have your promise. I'm to have one
more chance in Argentina, and if I fail you have your way; but I won't
fail."

He turned from me and stood very straight. His overcoat collar was
buttoned to the neck, hiding the uniform of his adversity. For a
moment, as I watched him, he seemed to be in the gulch again; we looked
over the towering walls of brick and stone, and to me they were the
ridge-side, dark and sombre in the gray light; we looked beyond the
crest of it, beyond the chimneys, the tall pines which pierced the
sky-line, and our eyes rested on a flake of cloud. I think it must
have been there. I felt the pressure of his hand.

"I'll not be gone long, Davy," he said. "I'm coming back very soon,
and till then you will take care of Penelope; won't you, boy?"

CHAPTER XXI

Spring came and with it the Todds. All that winter they had been so
far from me, often so far from my thoughts even, that the remembrance
of them would bring a shock like a sudden consciousness of sin or the
recollection of a duty left undone. My fiancee's communication with me
had dwindled to a weekly post-card. At first these had carried to me
some little hint of affection, but latterly Gladys had contented
herself with commonplace scrawls announcing that this was where they
were staying for a few days or that the window in the hotel marked with
a cross was hers. And my replies, so conscientiously written every
Saturday night, had become rather brief and formal statements of facts.
I had long since ceased to take Miss Minion's stairs two steps at a
time in my eagerness to secure the portly epistle from abroad; the
p