to stay. He may even have calculated on a lifetime, my friend. That's
why he put in the twenty-five. He probably realised that you'd be too
idiotic to use the money except as a means to bring about the millennium,
and so he said to himself 'I'll have to do something to keep the damn'
fool from starving.' You needn't have any scruples about taking your pay,
old boy. You've got to live, you know. I think I've got the old
gentleman's idea pretty--"

"Well, let's drop the subject for to-night, Simmy," said Thorpe, coming to
his feet. His chin was up and his shoulders thrown back as he breathed
deeply and fully of the new life that seemed to spring up mysteriously
from nowhere. "You'll spend the night with me. There is a spare bed and
you'll--"

"Isn't there a Ritz in the place?" inquired Simmy, scarcely able to
conceal his joy.

"Not so that you can notice it," replied Thorpe gaily. He walked to the
edge of the porch and drank in more of that strange, puzzling air that
came from vast distances and filled his lungs as they had never been
filled before.

Simmy watched him narrowly in the failing light. After a moment he sank
back comfortably in the old rocking chair and smiled as a cat might smile
in contemplating a captive mouse. The rest would be easy. Thorpe would go
back with him. That was all that he wanted, and perhaps more than he
expected. As for old Templeton Thorpe's "foundation," he did not give it a
moment's thought. Time would attend to that. Time would kill it, so what
was the use worrying. He prided himself on having done the job very
neatly,--and he was smart enough to let the matter rest.

"What is the news in town?" asked Braden, turning suddenly. There was a
new ring in his voice. He was eager for news of the town!

"Well," said Simmy naively, "there is so much to tell I don't believe I
could get it all out before dinner."

"We call it supper, Simmy."

"It's all the same to me," said Simmy.

And after supper he told him the news as they walked out along the
breakwater.

Anne Thorpe was in Europe. She closed the house as soon as George was able
to go to work, and went away without any definite notion as to the length
of her stay abroad.

"She's terribly upset over having to live in that old house down there,"
said Simmy, "and I don't blame her. It's full of ghosts, good and bad. It
has always been her idea to buy a big house farther up town. In fact, that
was one of the things on which she had