struthers' money should have rescued her boy's inheritance instead
of being spent upon lavish viciousness went without saying. What
Mount Dunstan was most struck by was the perfect clearness, and its
combination with a certain judicial good breeding, in Miss Vanderpoel's
view of the matter. She made no confidences, beautifully candid as her
manner was, but he saw that she clearly understood the thing she was
doing, and that if her sister had had no son she would not have
done this, but something totally different. He had an idea that Lady
Anstruthers would have been swiftly and lightly swept back to New York,
and Sir Nigel left to his own devices, in which case Stornham Court
and its village would gradually have crumbled to decay. It was for Sir
Ughtred Anstruthers the place was being restored. She was quite clear on
the matter of entail. He wondered at first--not unnaturally--how a girl
had learned certain things she had an obviously clear knowledge of. As
they continued to converse he learned. Reuben S. Vanderpoel was without
doubt a man remarkable not only in the matter of being the owner of vast
wealth. The rising flood of his millions had borne him upon its strange
surface a thinking, not an unthinking being--in fact, a strong and
fine intelligence. His thousands of miles of yearly journeying in his
sumptuous private car had been the means of his accumulating not merely
added gains, but ideas, points of view, emotions, a human outlook worth
counting as an asset. His daughter, when she had travelled with him, had
seen and talked with him of all he himself had seen. When she had not
been his companion she had heard from him afterwards all best worth
hearing. She had become--without any special process--familiar with
the technicalities of huge business schemes, with law and commerce
and political situations. Even her childish interest in the world
of enterprise and labour had been passionate. So she had
acquired--inevitably, while almost unconsciously--a remarkable
education.

"If he had not been HIMSELF he might easily have grown tired of a little
girl constantly wanting to hear things--constantly asking questions,"
she said. "But he did not get tired. We invented a special knock on the
door of his private room. It said, 'May I come in, father?' If he was
busy he answered with one knock on his desk, and I went away. If he had
time to talk he called out, 'Come, Betty,' and I went to him. I used to
sit upon the floor a