ingenuousness of this old habitue of a cynical world and an intriguing
and insincere society, to whom no scheme had been too wild for
acceptance. As Bradley listened with a half-saddened smile to the grave
visions of this aged enthusiast, he remembered the son's unsophisticated
simplicity: what he had considered as the "boyishness" of immaturity was
the taint of the utterly unpractical Mainwaring blood. It was upon this
blood, and others like it, that Oldenhurst had for centuries waxed and
fattened.

Bradley was true to his promise of assistance, and with the aid of two
or three of his brother-millionaires, whose knowledge of the resources
of the locality was no less powerful and convincing than the security
of their actual wealth, managed to stay the immediate action of the
catastrophe until the affairs of the Sierran Land and Timber Company
could be examined and some plan of reconstruction arranged.

During this interval of five months, in which the credit of Sir Robert
Mainwaring was preserved with the secret of his disaster, Bradley was a
frequent and welcome visitor to Oldenhurst. Apart from his strange and
chivalrous friendship for the Mainwarings--which was as incomprehensible
to Sir Robert as Sir Robert's equally eccentric and Quixotic
speculations had been to Bradley--he began to feel a singular and weird
fascination for the place. A patient martyr in the vast London house he
had taken for his wife and cousin's amusement, he loved to escape the
loneliness of its autumn solitude or the occasional greater loneliness
of his wife's social triumphs. The handsome, thoughtful man who
sometimes appeared at the foot of his wife's table or melted away like
a well-bred ghost in the hollow emptiness of her brilliant receptions,
piqued the languid curiosity of a few. A distinguished personage, known
for his tactful observance of convenances that others forgot, had made a