Nobody watched Elsie with a more searching eye than her cousin, Dick Venner.  He had kept more out of her way of late, it is true, but there was not a movement she made which he did not carefully observe just so far as he could without exciting her suspicion.  It was plain enough to him that the road to fortune was before him, and that the first thing was to marry Elsie.  What course he should take with her, or with others interested, after marrying her, need not be decided in a hurry.

He had now done all he could expect to do at present in the way of conciliating the other members of the household.  The girl’s father tolerated him, if he did not even like him.  Whether he suspected his project or not Dick did not feel sure; but it was something to have got a foot-hold in the house, and to have overcome any prepossession against him which his uncle might have entertained.  To be a good listener and a bad billiard-player was not a very great sacrifice to effect this object.  Then old Sophy could hardly help feeling well-disposed towards him, after the gifts he had bestowed on her and the court he had paid her.  These were the only persons on the place of much importance to gain over.  The people employed about the house and farmlands had little to do with Elsie, except to obey her without questioning her commands.

Mr. Richard began to think of reopening his second parallel.  But he had lost something of the coolness with which he had begun his system of operations.  The more he had reflected upon the matter, the more he had convinced himself that this was his one great chance in life.  If he suffered this girl to escape him, such an opportunity could hardly, in the nature of things, present itself a second time.  Only one life between Elsie and her fortune,—­and lives are so uncertain!  The girl might not suit him as a wife.  Possibly.  Time enough to find out after he had got her.  In short, he must have the property, and Elsie Venner, as she was to go with it,—­and then, if he found it convenient and agreeable to lead a virtuous life, he would settle down and raise children and vegetables; but if he found it inconvenient and disagreeable, so much the worse for those that made it so.  Like many other persons, he was not principled against virtue, provided virtue were a better investment than its opposite; but he knew that there might be contingencies in which the property would be better without its incumbrances, and he contemplated this conceivable problem in the light of all its possible solutions.

One thing Mr. Richard could not conceal from himself:  Elsie had some new cause of indifference, at least, if not of aversion to him.  With the acuteness which persons who make a sole business of their own interest gain by practice, so that fortune-hunters are often shrewd where real lovers are terribly simple, he fixed at once on the young man up at the school where the girl had been going of late, as probably at the bottom of it.