But Elinor had made her small concession to David Kent’s letter, and she would not withdraw it.

“Probably you don’t own any Western Pacific stock,” she suggested.  “We do; and we mean to be loyal to our salt.”

Ormsby laughed.

“I see Western Pacific has gone down a few points since the election of Governor Bucks.  If I had any, I’d wire my broker to sell.”

“We are not so easily frightened,” she asserted; adding, with a touch of the austerity which was her Puritan birthright:  “Nor quite so conscienceless as you men.”

“Conscience,” he repeated half absently; “is there any room for such an out-of-date thing in a nation of successfulists?  But seriously; you ought to get rid of Western Pacific.  There can be no possible question of conscience involved.”

“I don’t agree with you,” she retorted with prompt decision.  “If we were to sell now it would be because we were afraid it might prove to be a bad investment.  Therefore, for the sake of a presumably ignorant buyer, we have no right to sell.”

He smiled leniently.

“All of which goes to prove that you three lone women need a guardian.  But I mustn’t keep you any longer from Abigail and the trunks.  What time shall I send the expediters after your luggage?”

She told him, and went with him to the door.

“Please don’t think me ungrateful,” she said, when she had thrown the night-latch for him.  “I don’t mean to be.”

“I don’t think anything of you that I ought not to think:  in that I am as conscientious as even you could wish.  Good-by, until this evening.  I’ll meet you all at the station.”

As had come to be the regular order of things, Elinor found herself under fire when she went above stairs to rejoin her mother and sister.

Mrs. Brentwood was not indifferent to the Ormsby millions; neither had she forgotten a certain sentimental summer at the foot of Old Croydon.  She was a thin-lipped little person, plain-spoken to the verge of unfriendliness; a woman in whom the rugged, self-reliant, Puritan strain had become panic-acidulous.  And when the Puritan stock degenerates in that direction, it is apt to lack good judgment on the business side, and also the passivity which smooths the way for incompetence in less assertive folk.

Kent had stood something in awe, not especially of her personality, but of her tongue; and had been forced to acquiesce silently in Loring’s summing-up of Elinor’s mother as a woman who had taken culture and the humanizing amenities of the broader life much as the granite of her native hills takes polish—­reluctantly, and without prejudice to its inner granular structure.

“Elinor, you ought to be ashamed to keep Brookes Ormsby dangling the way you do,” was her comment when Elinor came back.  “You are your father’s daughters, both of you:  there isn’t a drop of the Grimkie blood in either of you, I do believe.”