d light flashed in
her eyes--"I am sorry you have had your journey for nothing."

"You--I'm afraid I don't understand."

"Please go back, Mr. North, and tell them that Gentleman Geoff's Billie
refuses to become Miss Willa Murdaugh. I don't want that wicked old
man's money, I don't want anything to do with any of that breed! If
those two poor young folks you tell me about were really my father and
mother, he was as guilty of their deaths as if he'd shot them down in
cold blood! Of course, he did not need to help them if they defied his
wishes, but to starve them, to drive them from pillar to post and deny
them the right to earn the money with which to live, to force other
people to close their doors--oh, he wasn't square!"

"But, my dear young lady! All that was long ago, and he is dead. He
regretted the past, he tried to make restitution. As an evidence of
that he has made you his heiress----"

"Not if I refuse." Her tone was still quiet, but her breast rose and
fell convulsively. "You said awhile ago that no one need know about my
being adopted. You meant no one need know about Dad, didn't you? That
I'd been brought up by a gambler in an oil-boom town? You thought I'd
be ashamed of Dad among all those fine people? Why, I'm proud of him!
Proud that I was known as his girl! He took me when nobody else cared
whether I lived or died, and he's loved me and been everything to me
ever since I can remember. And he was square! It's my own grandfather
that I'm ashamed of for his crookedness! He stacked the cards, and
that's all I need to know about him. Give that Mrs. Halstead what she
was going to get for making me over into a lady, and tell her she
needn't bother. I was raised Gentleman Geoff's Billie and that's good
enough for me. I'm going to stay right here."

"You cannot realize what you are saying!" Mr. North betrayed symptoms
of imminent apoplexy. "You can have no conception now of what this
will mean to you in the future. Millions are involved, I tell you,
millions!"

"I don't want them," she reiterated doggedly. "I don't want even the
name. If I've got to have another, I'll take my mother's--Ashton,
wasn't it?"

The rotund little lawyer bounced from his chair and strode up and down
before the bar, his hands clenched behind his back and his mustache
bristling. The girl watched him curiously, after a brief glance at
Jim, who was sitting very straight, obviously fighting back the words
wh