"But she told you something," she persisted. "Otherwise, you could never
have made _Fidelia_ all over again, as you have in this rewriting."

"Maybe she did," he admitted. "But that doesn't matter. You think I have
bettered the story, and I know I have. And I know where I got the
inspiration to do it."

She was smiling across at him, level-eyed.

"Let me pass it back to you, dear boy," she said. "You have the making
of a great novelist in you. It may take years and years, and--and I'm
afraid you'll always have to be helped; but if you can only get the
right kind of help...." She looked away, out across the lake where a
fitful breeze was turning the molten-metal dimples into laughing
wavelets. Then, with one of her sudden topic-wrenchings: "Speaking of
help, reminds me. Why didn't you tell me you had gone into the foundry
business with Edward Raymer?"

"Because it didn't occur to me that you would care to know, I guess," he
answered unsuspectingly. "As a matter of fact, I had almost forgotten
it myself."

"Was it a good investment?" she asked guilelessly.

"Yes; that is, I presume it was. I didn't think much about that part of
it."

"What did you think about?"

It was just here that he awoke to the realization that he could hardly
afford to give Jasper Grierson's daughter the real reason for the
investment. So he prevaricated, knowing well enough that he had less
than no chance in an evasive duel with her.

"Raymer had been adding to his plant, and he lacked capital," he said
guardedly. "I had the money, and it was lying idle."

"Mr. Raymer didn't ask you for help?"

"No; it was my own offer."

"But he did tell you that he was in trouble?"

"Y-yes," hesitantly.

"What kind of trouble was it, Kenneth? I have the best right in the
world to know."

Griswold straightened himself in his chair and the work-weariness became
a thing of the past. With the fairly evident fact staring him in the
face from day to day, it had never occurred to him that his friend and
business partner might also be his fellow-prisoner in the house of the
witcheries. The sudden convincement stung a little, the all-monopolizing
selfishness of the craftsman carrying easily over into the field of
sentiment. Yet it was clean friendship for Raymer, no less than for the
daughter of desire, that prompted him to say:

"You can't have a right to know anything that will distress you."

"Foolish!" she chided--and this time the epithet had