ill be better able to
assimilate and to judge."

"I await your pleasure," the young man said with impatience he strove
to conceal.

"Very well," John Pride said, his eyes growing vague with a far-away
look.

CHAPTER IV

_John Pride's Story_

"I am a member," John Pride began, "of a firm called Pride, Conroy,
and Wilson. We are a very old firm of private bankers with offices in
Wall Street. Both Conroy and Wilson died before I was born, leaving no
issue, so the company has been controlled by a Pride for many years.

"This affair in which we are interested had its inception one hundred
years ago. At that time, a man came to see my great grandfather in his
office. He was a most remarkable man and gained my grandfather's
respect and confidence from the very first. He never stated from
whence he came, being more interested in the future than in the past.
He put up at a New York City hotel and my great grandfather knew there
were three in his party; the man himself, another man and a woman both
somewhat older than he.

"At one time when my great grandfather visited them in their hotel
suite, he saw the woman fleetingly as she was leaving the room. She
was carrying something that he thought could have been an infant
snuggled in a blanket. He could not be sure however and he did not ask
questions.

"The man was interested in obtaining a place of abode, a place that
had to possess certain definite qualifications. First, it had to be
built upon solid rock and set in the most secluded location possible.

"Second, it had to be so completely free of legal involvements that
when he secured title, no possible claim of another could ever be
taken seriously enough to even cause the property to be visited. In
short, the strange man said, details relevant to the property must
integrate to a point where no one would visit it for one hundred
years."

At this place in his narrative, John Pride stopped a moment to rest
his voice. After a pause, the young man in the purple robe inquired,
"Why do you smile?"

"At the recollection. My great grandfather had just a white
elephant--"

"A white elephant?"

"Merely a descriptive term. A place that had been built before the
Revolution but which even at that early time had been bypassed by the
trend of progress until it was completely isolated. No one wanted it.
No one would ever want it so far as my great grandfather could judge."

"Except this strange man you speak of."