The Grafters Part 55

"This." He had cut out a flattened bullet and was holding it up for her to see. "It was meant for me, and I've always had an idea that I heard it strike the woodwork."

"For you? Were you ever here when the house was occupied?"

"Yes, once; it is the Senator Duvall place. This is the window where I broke in."

She nodded intelligence.

"I know now why you are going to buy it. The senator is another of those whom you haven't forgiven."

His laugh was a ready denial.

"I have nothing against Duvall. He was one of Bucks' dupes, and he is paying the price. The property is to be sold at a forced sale, and it is a good investment."

"Is that all it means to you? It is too fine to be hawked about as a thing to make money with. It's a splendidly ideal home--leaving out that thing that Penelope is quarreling with." And she made a feint of stopping her ears.

He laughed again.

"Ormsby says I ought to buy it, and marry and settle down."

She took him seriously.

"You don't need it. Miss Van Brock has a very lovely home of her own," she said soberly.

It was at his tongue's end to tell the woman he loved how the woman he did not love had refused him, but he saved himself on the brink and said:

"Why Miss Van Brock?"

"Because she is vindictive, too, and----"

"But I am not vindictive."

"Yes, you are. Do you know anything about Judge MacFarlane's family affairs?"

"A little. He has three daughters; one of them rather unhappily married, I believe."

"Have you considered the cost to these three women if you make their father's name a byword in the city where they were born?"

"He should have considered it," was the unmoved reply.

"David!" she said; and he looked up quickly.

"You want me to let him resign? It would be compounding a felony. He is a Judge, and he was bribed."

She sat down beside him in the cushioned window seat and began to plead with him.

"You must let him go," she insisted. "It is entirely in your hands as chairman of the House committee; the governor, himself, told me so. I know all you say about him is true; but he is old and wretched, with only a little while to live, at best."

There was a curious little smile curling his lip when he answered her.

"He has chosen a good advocate. It is quite like a man of his stamp to try to reach me through you."

"David!" she said again. Then: "I really shouldn't know him if I were to see him."

"Then why----" he began; but there was a love-light in the blue-gray eyes to set his heart afire. "You are doing this for me?" he said, trembling on the verge of things unutterable.

"Yes. You don't know how it hurts me to see you growing hard and merciless as you climb higher and higher in the path you have marked out for yourself."

"The path you have marked out for me," he corrected. "Do you remember our little talk over the embers of the fire in your sitting-room at home? I knew then that I had lost the love I might have won; but the desire to be the kind of leader you were describing was born in me at that moment. I haven't always been true to the ideal. I couldn't be, lacking the right to wear your colors on my heart----"

"Don't!" she said. "I haven't been true to my ideals. I--I sold them, David!"

She was in his arms when she said it, and the bachelor maid was quite lost in the woman.

"I'll never believe that," he said loyally. "But if you did, we'll buy them back--together."

Penelope was good to them. It was a full half-hour before she professed herself satisfied with the mechanical piano-toy; and when she was through, she helped the woman caretaker to shut the Venetians with clangings that would have warned the most oblivious pair of lovers.

And afterward, when they were free of the house, she ran ahead to the waiting auto-car, leaving Kent and Elinor to follow at a snail's pace down the leaf-covered walk to the gate. There was a cedar hedge to mark the sidewalk boundary, and while it still screened them Kent bent quickly to the upturned face of happiness.

"One more," he pleaded; and when he had it: "Do you know now, dearest, why I brought you here to-day?"

She nodded joyously.

"It is the sweetest old place. And, David, dear; we'll bring our ideals--all of them; and it shall be your haven when the storms beat."