What arguments Edward Raymer used to convince his mother and sister that Griswold as a participating partner was better than Jasper Grierson figuring as the man in possession, the Wahaskan gossips were unable to guess. But the fact remained. Within a week from the day when Raymer, angrily jubilant, had rescued his imperilled stock, it was pretty generally known that Kenneth Griswold, the writing-man, had become the fourth member in the close corporation of the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works, and Wahaska was eagerly earning Broffin's contemptuous characterization of it by discussing the business affair in all its possible and probable bearings upon the Raymers, the Griersons, and the newly elected directory of the Pineboro Railroad.

Of all this buzzing of the gossip bees the person most acutely concerned heard little or nothing. Griswold's intimation to Raymer that he wished only to be a silent partner had been made in good faith; and beyond a few purely perfunctory visits to the plant across the railroad tracks, made because Raymer had insisted that he go over the books and learn for himself the exact condition of the business into which he had put his money, Griswold took no more than an advisory part in the industrial activities. To Raymer's urgings there was always the same answer: the writing fit was on him and he had no time.

Taken for what it was worth, the writing excuse was sufficiently valid. In the fallow period of the slow convalescence the imaginative field had grown fertile for the plough, and a new book, borrowing nothing from the old save the sociological background, was already under way. Digging deeply in the inspirational field, Griswold speedily became oblivious to most of his encompassments; to all of them, indeed, save those which bore directly upon the beloved task. Among these, he counted the frequent afternoon visits to Mereside, and the scarcely less frequent evenings spent in the Farnham home. Again in harmony with the later prefigurings, he was using each of the young women as a foil for the other in the outworking of his plot; and he welcomed it as a sign of growth that the story in its new form was acquiring verisimilitude and becoming gratefully, and at times, he persuaded himself, quite vividly, human.

When he got well into the swing of it and was turning out a chapter every three or four days, he fell easily into the habit of slipping the last instalment into his pocket when he went to Mereside. Margery Grierson was adding generously to his immense obligation to her; hoping only to find a friendly listener, he found a helpful collaborator. More than once, when his own imagination was at fault, she was able to open new vistas in the humanities for him, apparently drawing upon a reserve of intuitive conclusions compared with which his own hard-bought store of experimental knowledge was almost puerile.

"I wish you would tell me the secret of your marvellous cleverness!" he exclaimed, on one of the June afternoons when he had been reading to her in the cool half-shadows of the Mereside library. "You are only a child in years: how can you know with such miraculous certainty what other people would think and do under conditions about which you can't possibly know anything experimentally? It's beyond me!"

"There are many things beyond you yet, dear boy; many, many things," was her laughing rejoinder; from which it will be inferred that the episode in the Farmers' and Merchants' burglar-proof had become an episode forgotten—or at least forgiven. "You know men—a little; but when it comes to the women ... well, if I didn't keep continually nagging at you, your two heroines—with neither of whom you are really in love—would degenerate into rag dolls. They would, actually."

"That's true; I can see it clearly enough when you point it out," he admitted, putting his craftsman pride underfoot, as he was always obliged to do in these talks with her. "I should be discouraged if you didn't keep on telling me that the story, as a story, is good."

"It is good; it is a big story," she asserted, with kindling enthusiasm. "The plot, so far as you have gone with it, is fine; and that is where you leave me away behind. I don't see how you could ever think it out. And the character-drawing is fine, too, some of it. Your Fleming is as far beyond me as your Fidelia seems to be beyond you."

"Fleming is human in every drop of his blood," he boasted.

"I don't doubt it for a moment; all the little ear-marks of humanity are there, and I know in reason that he must be a type. But I have never met the man himself; and I am sure I shall be scared silly if I ever do meet him. Think of being shut up in any little corner of the world with a man who has convinced himself that he can commit any crime in the calendar so long as he believes the particular one he chooses isn't a crime!"

"Crime, so-called, is like everything else in this world; a thing to be defined strictly by the motive and the point of view," said Griswold, mounting his hobby with joyous alacrity.

"I know; that is what you say"—this with an adorable uptilt of the pretty chin and a flash of the dark eyes which an instant before had been slumbrous wells of studious abstraction. "But your Fleming is going to prove the contrary; it may not be what you want him to do, but it will be what he will insist upon doing before you get through with him. You have already indicated it in the story, unconsciously, perhaps. When Fidelia surprises him, Fleming is almost ready to kill her; not in defense of the principle he has set up, but to save his own miserable life."

"That is a part of his humanity," insisted the craftsman stubbornly. "You don't know Fleming yet. Have you ever met Fidelia?"

"Not as you have drawn her—no. She is too unutterably fine. If she had a single shred of humanity about her, I should suspect you of meaning to fall in love with her, farther along—to the humiliation and despair of poor Joan, who, as you say, is a mere daughter of men."

"But how about Joan?" he fretted. "Is she out of drawing, too?"

"Yes; you are distorting her the other way—making her too inhumanly worldly and insincere." Then, with an abruptness that was like a slap in the face: "If you didn't spend so many evenings at Doctor Bertie's, you would get both Fidelia and Joan in better drawing."

He flushed and drew himself up, with the stabbed amour propre prompting him to make some stinging retort contrasting the wells of truth with the brackish waters of sheer worldliness. Then he saw how inadequate it would be; how utterly impossible it was to meet this charmingly vindictive young person upon any grounds save those of her own choosing.

"That is the first really unkind thing I have ever heard you say," was the mild reproach which was all that the reactionary second thought would sanction.

"Unkind to whom?—to you, or to Miss Farnham?"

"Ask yourself," he countered weakly; and she laughed at him.

"There is another of your failings, Kenneth. You haven't always the courage of your convictions. What you are thinking is that I am a spiteful little cat. Why don't you say it out loud, like a man?"

"Because I'm not thinking it," he denied, adding: "But I do think you are a little inclined to be unfair to Miss Charlotte."

"Am I? Let us see if I am. I accuse her of nothing but a slavish devotion to custom and the conventions. What did she say when you read her the chapter before this one: where Fidelia goes down to the dining-room at midnight and finds Fleming breaking into the silver-safe where the money is hidden?"

"I'm not reading the story to her," he admitted, and again she laughed.

"But you do talk it over with her; you couldn't help doing that," she persisted.

"Sometimes," he allowed.

"Well, what did she say when you came to that part where Fidelia makes Fleming sit down while she tries to convince him that house-breaking is a crime. You don't dare tell me what she said."

Griswold did it, with a firm convincement that he was thereby breaking a sacred confidence. But the alluring lips and eyes were irresistible when he was fairly within their influence.

"I merely suggested the scene as something that might be done," he explained. "She did not approve of it. Her objection was that the Fidelias in real life don't do such things."

"They don't," was Miss Margery's flippant agreement. "And your letting your Fidelia do it is the one redeeming thing you have done in your drawing of her. Just the same, with all your ingenuity you leave one with the firm conviction that she will never, under any circumstances, do such an unconventional thing again; never, never, never! And that is a false note."

"Why is it?"

"Because it leaves out the common sex-factor; the one that is shared alike by the Fidelias and the Joans and all the rest of us."

"And that is——"

"Just plain, every-day inconsistency—our dearest heritage from good old Mother Eve. Being a mere man, you can't understand that, so you neglect to put it into your women."

"But I can't let that stand," he objected. "You must allow the ideal some little latitude. Fidelia was not inconsistent, either in striving with Fleming, or in betraying him."

Miss Grierson's perfect shoulders twitched in a little shrug of impatience.

"Not that time, maybe; with Fleming standing by to tell her that she must be true to herself at whatever cost to him. But the next time—if she should happen to fall in love with the gentleman who was breaking into her father's house-safe...." She laughed in sheer mockery and misquoted a couplet from Riley for him:

"Break some more of them if you can," he urged. "A few more casualties won't make any difference."

"There is only the boy-doll left; and I don't like to break boy-dolls."

"Fleming, you mean? I give you leave. Hammer him until he bleeds sawdust, if the spirit moves you."

Miss Grierson had been curled up like a comfortable kitten in the depths of a great lounging chair—her favorite attitude while he was reading to her. But now she sat up and locked her fingers over one knee.

"I said a little while ago that I'd never met Fleming, and I haven't. But I like him, and I'm sorry to see him putting himself in for such a savage hereafter. He is a good man, like other good men, with the single difference that he thinks he isn't bound by the traditions. He believes he can commit what the traditionary people call a crime without paying the penalties. He can't: nobody can."

Griswold's smile was the superior smile of the writing craftsman. "That is merely a matter of invention," he asserted. "He can escape the penalties if he is smart enough."

"You mistake me," she interposed. "I don't mean the physical penalties; though as to these the old saying that murder will out must have some foundation in fact. Let that go: we'll suppose him clever enough to make his escape and to outwit or outfight his enemies. I don't say he couldn't do it successfully; but I do say that, with the hazards confronting him at every turn, he will find the real criminal in him growing and possessing him, making him think things and do things of the utter depravity of which he has never had any doubt."

While she was speaking Griswold could feel the change she was describing stealing over him like a nightmare, and when she stopped he passed his hand over his eyes as one awaking from a vaguely terrifying dream.

"You mean that there is a real criminal in every man?" he questioned, and the question seemed to say itself of its own volition.

"In every man and in every woman: how can you be a writer and not know that? Ask yourself. You admit the existence of the good and the bad, and ordinarily you choose the good and shudder at the bad: tell me—haven't there been times when the most horrible crimes were possible to you?—times when, with the littlest tipping of the balance, you could have killed somebody? You needn't answer: I know you have looked over that brink, because I have looked over it myself, more than once. And, sooner or later, Fleming will find himself looking over it—with all the horrors of the penalties pushing and shoving at him to tumble him into the gulf."

Griswold did not reply. He was gathering up the scattered pages of his manuscript and replacing them in order. When he spoke again it was of a matter entirely irrelevant.

"I had an odd experience the other evening," he said. "I had been dining with the Raymers and was walking back to Shawnee Street. A little newsboy named Johnnie Fergus turned up from somewhere at one of the street crossings and tried to sell me a paper—at eleven o'clock at night! I bought one and joked him about being out so late; and from that on I couldn't get rid of him. He went all the way home with me, talking a blue streak and acting as if he were afraid of something or somebody. I remembered afterward that he is the boy who takes care of your boat. Is there anything wrong with him?"

Miss Grierson had left her chair and had gone to stand at one of the windows.

"Nothing that I know of," she said. "He is a bright boy—too bright for his own good, I'm afraid. But I can explain—a little. Johnnie has taken a violent fancy to you for some reason, and he has fallen into the boyish habit of weaving all sorts of romances around you. I think he reads too many exciting stories and tries to make you the hero of them. He told me the other day that he was sure somebody was 'spotting' you."

Griswold looked up quickly. Miss Grierson was still facing the window, and he was glad that she had not seen his nervous start.

"'Spotting' me?" he laughed. "Where did he get that idea?"

"How should I know? But he had made himself believe it; he even went so far as to describe the man. Oh, I can assure you Johnnie has an imagination; I've tested it in other ways."

"I should think so!" said the man who also had an imagination, and shortly afterward he took his leave.

An hour later the same afternoon, Broffin, from his post of observation on the Winnebago porch, saw the writing-man cross the street and enter a hardware shop. Having nothing better to do, he, too, crossed the street and, in passing, looked into the open door of Simmons & Kleifurt's. What he saw brought him back at the end of a reflective stroll around the public square. When he entered the shop the clerk was putting a formidable array of weapons back into their show-case niches. Broffin lounged up and began to handle the pistols.

"If I knew enough about guns to be able to tell 'em apart, I might buy one," he said half-humorously. And then: "You must've been having a mighty particular customer—to get so many of 'em out."

"It was Mr. Griswold, Mr. Ed. Raymer's new partner," said the clerk. "And he was pretty particular; wouldn't have anything but these new-fashioned automatics. Said he wanted something that would be quick and sure, and I guess he's got it—I sold him two of 'em."

Broffin played with the stock long enough to convince the clerk that he was only a counter lounger with no intention of buying. "Took two of 'em, did he?—for fear one might make him sick, I reckon," he said, with the half-humorous grin still lurking under the drooping mustaches. "Automatic thirty-twos, eh? Well, I ain't goin' to try to hold your Mr.—Griscom, did you call him?—up none after this. He might git me."

Whereupon, having found out what he wanted to know, he lounged out again and went back to the hotel to smoke another of the reflective cigars in the porch chair which had come to be his by right of frequent and long-continued occupancy.