on why. He
did not want to elope with the young woman; in fact, he felt that she
wouldn't elope if he asked her, for she was fond of her father, and he
knew that his end must be attained by vast diplomacy. Just how, he had
not decided upon. But he felt his way vaguely.

"One thing is certain," he said to himself, "I must keep my temper and
cultivate the old man."

He did cultivate Mr. Grampus, and did it so well that after a season the
two would even lunch together. It was an anomalous happening, this
lunching together, of a poor young man with a rich old one, who had
refused a daughter's hand; but such things occur in the grotesque, huge
Western money-mart. In Chicago there is a great gulf fixed between
business and family relations. Grampus began to consider Simpson an
excellent fellow--that is, as one to meet at luncheon, not as a
son-in-law. A son-in-law should have money.

There was a skeleton in the Grampus closet, but it was not scandalous,
and was never mentioned. Still, to old Mr. Grampus, the guilty one, the
skeleton was real and terrible. He, the gruff, overbearing, successful
man of business, the one beneath whose gaze clerks shuddered and
stenographers turned pale, was afraid to go home at least four nights of
the seven nights in the week. He was afraid to meet his wife.

A great club man was Mr. Grampus. He delighted in each evening spent
with his old cronies, in the whist-playing, the reminiscences, the
storytelling, the arguments, and the moderate smoking and drinking.
Unfortunately, he could not endure well the taking into his system of
anything alcoholic. He always became perfectly sober within three hours,
but a punch or two would give a certain flaccidity to his legs, and when
he reached his home the broad steps leading up to the vestibule seemed
Alpine-like and perilous. He would almost say to himself, "Beware the
pine-tree's withered branch, beware the awful avalanche." But after all
it was not the danger of the ascent which really troubled him; it was
what would assuredly happen after he had reached the summit. The
disaster always came upon the plateau.

The man could fumble in his pockets with much discretion, and could
always find his latch-key, for its shape was odd, but with that
latch-key he could not find the keyhole in the door. There came a clamor
always at the end. When finally he entered, Mrs. Grampus was as alive
and alert as any tarantula of an Arizona plain aroused by a noise upo