“Ouch!” said Bobby. “That was snowballing a cripple,” and he was really most woebegone about it.
“Never mind, Bobby, you have still plenty of chance to win,” comforted Agnes, who, though laughing, had sympathetic inkling of that sore spot which had been touched. He seemed so forlorn, in spite of his big, good-natured self, that she moved closer to him and unconsciously put her hand upon his arm. It was too much for him in view of the way she looked, and, suddenly emboldened, he did a thing the mere thought of which, under premeditation, would have scared him into a frappéd perspiration. He placed his hands upon her shoulders, and, drawing her toward him, bent swiftly down to kiss her. For a fleeting instant she drew back, and then Bobby had the surprise of his life, for her warm lips met his quite willingly, and with a frank pressure almost equal to his own. She sprang back from him at once with sparkling eyes, but he had no mind to follow up his advantage, for he was dazed. It had left him breathless, amazed, incredulous. He stood for a full minute, his face gone white with the overwhelming wonder of this thing that had happened to him, and then the blunt directness which was part of his inheritance from his father returned to him.
“Well, anyhow, we’re to be engaged at last,” he said.
“No,” she rebuked him, with a sudden flash of mischief; “that was perfectly wicked, and you mustn’t do it again.”
“But I will,” he said, advancing with heightened color.
“You mustn’t,” she said firmly, and although she did not recede farther from him he stopped. “You mustn’t make it hard for us, Bobby,” she warned him. “I’m under promise, too; and that’s all I can tell you now.”
“The governor again,” groaned Bobby. “I suppose that I’m not to talk to you about marrying, nor you to listen, until I have proved my right and ability to take care of you and your fortune and mine. Is that it?”
She smiled inscrutably.
“What brings you at this unearthly hour?” she asked by way of evasion. “Some business pretext, I’ll be bound.”
“Of course it is,” he assured her. “This morning you are strictly in the rôle of my trustee. I want you to look at some property.”
“But I have an appointment with my dressmaker.”
“The dressmaker must wait.”
“What a warning!” she laughed. “If you would order a mere – a mere acquaintance around so peremptorily, what would you do if you were married?”
“I’d be the boss,” announced Bobby with calm confidence.
“Indeed?” she mocked, and started into the library. “You’d ask permission first, wouldn’t you?”
“Where are you going?” he queried in return, and grinned.
“To telephone my dressmaker,” she admitted, smiling, and realizing, too, that it was not all banter.
“I told you to, remember,” asserted Bobby, with a strange new sense of masterfulness which would not down.
When she came down again, dressed for the trip, he was still in that dazed elation, and it lasted through their brisk ride to the far outskirts of the city, where, at the side of a watery marsh that extended for nearly a mile along the roadway, he halted.
“This is it,” waving his hand across the dismal waste.
“It!” she repeated. “What?”
“The property that it was suggested I buy.”
“No wonder your father thought it necessary to appoint a trustee,” was her first comment. “Why, Bobby, what on earth could you do with it? It’s too large for a frog farm and too small for a summer resort,” and once more she turned incredulous eyes upon the “property.”
Dark, oily water covered the entire expanse, and through it emerged, here and there, clumps of dank vegetation, from the nature and dispersement of which one could judge that the water varied from one to three feet in depth. Higher ground surrounded it on all sides, and the urgent needs of suburban growth had scattered a few small, cheap cottages, here and there, upon the hills.
“It doesn’t seem very attractive until you consider those houses,” Bobby confessed. “You must remember that the city hasn’t room to grow, and must take note that it is trying to spread in this direction. Wouldn’t a fellow be doing a rather public-spirited thing, and one in which he might take quite a bit of satisfaction, if he drained that swamp, filled it, laid out streets and turned the whole stretch into a cluster of homes in place of a breeding-place for fevers?”
“You talk just like a civic improvement society,” she said, laughing.
“We did have a chap lecturing on that down at the club a few nights ago,” he admitted, “and maybe I have picked up a bit of the talk. But wouldn’t it be a good thing, anyhow?”
“Oh, I quite approve of it, now that I see your plan,” she agreed; “but could it be made to pay?”
“Well,” he returned with a grave assumption of that businesslike air he had recently been trying to copy down at the Traders’ Club, “there are one hundred and twenty acres in the tract. I can buy it for two hundred dollars an acre, and sell each acre, in building lots, for full six hundred. It seems to me that this is enough margin to carry out the needed improvements and make the marketing of it worth while. What do you think of it?”
They both gazed out over that desolate expanse and tried to picture it dotted with comfortable cottages, set down in grassy lawns that bordered on white, clean streets, and the idea of the transformation was an attractive one.
“It looks to me like a perfectly splendid idea,” Agnes admitted. “I wonder what your father would have thought of it.”
“Well,” confessed Bobby a trifle reluctantly, “this very proposition was presented to him several times, I believe, but he always declined to go into it.”
“Then,” decided Agnes, so quickly and emphatically that it startled him, “don’t touch it!”
“Oh, but you see,” he reminded her, “the governor couldn’t go into everything that was offered him, and to this plan he never urged any objection but that he had too many irons in the fire.”
“I wouldn’t touch it,” declared Agnes, and that was her final word in the matter, despite all his arguments. If John Burnit had declined to go into it, no matter for what reason, the plan was not worth considering.
CHAPTER VIII
BOBBY SUCCEEDS IN SNAPPING A BARGAIN FROM UNDER SILAS TRIMMER’S NOSE
Still undecided, but carrying seriously the thought that he must overlook no opportunity if he was to prove himself the successful man that his father had so ardently wished him to become, Bobby dropped into the Idlers’ Club for lunch, where Nick Allstyne and Payne Winthrop hailed him as one returned from the dead.
“Just the chap,” declared Nick. “Stan Rogers has written me that I’m to scrape the regular crowd together and come up to his new Canadian lodge for a hunt. Stag affair, you know. Real sport and no pink-coat pretense.”
“Sorry, Nick,” said Bobby, pluming himself a trifle upon his steadfastness to duty, “but I know what Stan’s stag affairs are like. It would mean two weeks at least, and I could not spare that much time from the city.”
“Business again!” groaned Payne in mock dismay. “This grasping greed for gain is blighting the most promising young men of our avaricious country. Why, it’s positively shameful, Bobby, when your father must have left you over three million.”
“Two hundred and fifty thousand, so far as I’m allowed to inquire just now,” corrected Bobby; “and I’m ordered to go into business with that and prove that I’m not such a blithering idiot that I can’t