might hold would be carefully and thoughtfully neutralized
if Miss Grierson should see him. That she had not seen him became a fact
sufficiently well-assured when she sat down again and began to speak of
Griswold.

"How is the new partnership going, by this time," she asked, after the
manner of one who re-winnows the chaff of the commonplaces in the hope
of finding grain enough for the immediate need.

"So far as Griswold is concerned, you wouldn't notice that there is a
partnership," laughed the iron-founder. "I can't make him galvanize an
atom of interest in his investment. All I can get out of him is, 'Don't
bother me; I'm busy.'"

"Mr. Griswold is in a class by himself, don't you think?" was the
questioning comment.

"He is all kinds of a good fellow; that's all I know, and all I ask to
know," answered Raymer loyally.

"I believe that--now," said his companion, with the faintest possible
emphasis upon the time-word.

Broffin marked the emphasis, and the pause that preceded it, and leaned
forward to miss no word.

"Meaning that there was a time when you didn't believe it?" Raymer
asked.

"Meaning that there was a time when he had me scared half to death,"
confessed the one who seemed always to say the confidential thing as if
it were the most trivial. "Do you remember one day in the library, when
you found me looking over the files of the newspapers for the story of
the robbery of the Bayou State Security Bank in New Orleans?"

Raymer remembered it very well, and admitted it.

"That was the time when the dreadful idea was scaring me stiff," she
went on. "You remember the story, don't you? how the president--our Mr.
Galbraith here--was held up at the point of a pistol and marched to the
paying teller's window, and how the robber escaped on a river steamboat
and was recognized by somebody and was arrested at St. Louis?"

"Yes; I remember it all very clearly. Also I recollect how the second
newspaper notice told how he escaped from the officers at St. Louis.
Wasn't there something about a young woman being mixed up in it some
way?"

"There was: _she_ was the one who recognized the robber disguised as a
deck-hand on the boat."

Raymer seemed to have forgotten his impatience for a renewal of the
interview with the Pineboro Railroad master car builder.

"I don't seem to recall any mention of that in the newspapers," he said
half-doubtfully.

"The newspaper reporters didn't put two and two together, but