“A good many times,” he admitted, following her promptly back to first principles.

“And you have not found the answer?”

“Not one that fully satisfies me—­no.”

“I’ve found one.”

“Intuitively?” he smiled.

“No; it’s pure logic, this time.  Do you remember showing me a letter that Mr. Hunnicott wrote you just before the explosion—­a letter in which he repeated a bit of gossip about Mr. Semple Falkland and his mysterious visit to Gaston?”

“Yes, I remember it.”

“Do you know who Mr. Falkland is?”

“Who doesn’t?” he queried.  “He has half of Wall Street in his clientele.”

“Yes; but particularly he is the advisory counsel of the Plantagould System.  Ever since you showed me that letter I have been trying to account for his presence in Gaston on the day before Judge MacFarlane’s spring term of court.  I should never have found out but for Mrs. Brentwood.”

“Mrs. Brentwood!”

Miss Van Brock nodded.

“Yes; the mother of my—­of the young person for whom I am the alternative, is in a peck of trouble; I quote her verbatim.  She and her two daughters hold some three thousand shares of Western Pacific stock.  It was purchased at fifty-seven, and it is now down to twenty-one.”

“Twenty and a quarter to-day,” Kent corrected.

“Never mind the fractions.  The mother of the incomparable—­Penelope, has heard that I am a famous business woman; a worthy understudy for Mrs. Hetty Green; so she came to me for advice.  She had a letter from a New York broker offering her a fraction more than the market price for her three thousand shares of Western Pacific.”

“Well?” said Kent.

“Meaning what did I do?  I did what you did not do—­what you are not doing even now; I put two and two together in the twinkling of a bedstaff.  Why should a New York broker be picking up outlying Western Pacific at a fraction more than the market when the stock is sinking every day?  I was curious enough to pass the ‘why’ along to a friend of mine in Wall Street.”

“Of course he told you all about it,” said Kent, incredulously.

“He told me what I needed to know.  The broker in question is a Plantagould man.”

“Still I fail to ‘connect up,’ as the linemen say.”

“Do you?  Ah, David, David! will you leave it for a woman to point out what you should have suspected the moment you read that bit of gossip in Mr. Hunnicott’s letter?”

Her hand was on the arm of her chair.  He covered it with his own.

“I’ll leave it for you, Portia.  You are my good angel.”

She withdrew the hand quickly, but there was no more than playful resentment in her retort.

“Shame on you!” she scoffed.  “What would Miss Brentwood say?”

“I wish you would leave her out of it,” he frowned.  “You are continually ignoring the fact that she has promised to be the wife of another man.”