At noon the merchant and Henry ate luncheon in a club where thick rugs hushed a foot-fall into a mere whisper of a walk, where servants, grave of countenance and low of voice, seemed to underscore the chilliness of the place.  Henry was introduced to a number of astonished men, who said that they welcomed him home, and who immediately began to talk about something else; and he was shown through the large library, where a solitary man sat looking at the pictures in a comic weekly.  After leaving the club they went to a tailor’s shop, and then drove over the boulevards and through the parks.  Witherspoon, with no pronounced degree of pride, had conducted Henry through the Colossus; he had been pleased, of course, at the young man’s astonishment, and he must have been moved by a strong surge of self-glorification when his son wondered at the broadness of the Witherspoon empire, yet he had held in a strong subjection all signs of an unseemly pride.  But when he struck the boulevard system, his dignified reserve went to pieces.

“Finest on earth; no doubt about that.  Oh, of course, many years of talk and thousands of pages of print have paved the Paris boulevards with peculiar interest, but wipe out association, and where would they be in comparison with these?  Look at that stretch.  And a few years ago this land could have been picked up for almost nothing.  Look at those flowers.”

It was now past midsummmer, but no suggestion of a coming blight lay upon the flower-beds.  “Look at those trees.  Why, in time they will knock the New Haven elms completely out.”

CHAPTER IX.

The interviewers.

When they reached home at evening they found that five reporters had been shown into the library and were waiting for them.

“Glad to see you, gentlemen,” said Witherspoon, smiling in his way of pleasant dismissal, “but really that statement contains all that it is necessary for the public to know.  We don’t want to make a sensation of it, you understand.”

“Of course not,” one of the newspaper men replied.

“And,” said the merchant, with another smile, “I don’t know what else can be said.”

But the smile had missed its aim.  The attention of the visitors was settled upon Henry.  There was no chance for separate interviews, and questions were asked by first one and then another.

“You had no idea that your parents were alive?”

“Not until after my uncle’s death.”

“Had he ever told you why you were in his charge?”

“Yes; he said that at the death of my parents I had been given to him.”

“You of course knew the story of the mysterious disappearance of Henry Witherspoon.”

“Yes; when a boy I had read something about it.”

“In view of the many frauds that had been attempted, hadn’t you a fear that your father might he suspicious of you?”