What the necessity was, Sue sensed but vaguely.  It was there, nevertheless, almost amounting to an obsession.  For when the Desha and Waterbury type commingle there is but the one interpretation.  Need of money or clemency in the one case; need of social introduction or elevation through kinship in the other.

The latter was Waterbury’s case.  But he also loved Sue—­in his own way.  He had met her first at the Carter Handicap, and, as he confided to himself:  “She was a spanking filly, of good stock, and with good straight legs.”

His sincere desire to “butt into the Desha family” he kept for the moment to himself.  But as a preliminary maneuver he had intimated that a visit to the Desha home would not come in amiss.  And the old colonel, for reasons he knew and Waterbury knew, thought it would be wisest to accede.

Perhaps now the colonel was considering those reasons.  His room was next that of his daughter, and in her listening wakefulness she had heard him turn restlessly in bed.  Insomnia loves company as does misery.  Presently the colonel arose, and the strong smell of Virginia tobacco and the monotonous pad, pad of list slippers made themselves apparent.

Sue threw on a dressing-gown and entered her father’s room.  He was in a light green bathrobe, his white hair tousled like sea-foam as he passed and repassed his gaunt fingers through it.

“I can’t sleep,” said the girl simply.  She cuddled in a big armchair, her feet tucked under her.

He put a hand on her shoulder.  “I can’t, either,” he said, and laughed a little, as if incapable of understanding the reason.  “I think late eating doesn’t agree with me.  It must have been the deviled crab.”

“Mr. Waterbury?” suggested Sue.

“Eh?” Then Colonel Desha frowned, coughed, and finally laughed.  “Still a child, I see,” he added, with a deprecating shake of the head.  “Will you ever grow up?”

“Yes—­when you recognize that I have.”  She pressed her cheek against the hand on her shoulder.

Sue practically managed the entire house, looking after the servants, expenses, and all, but the colonel always referred to her as “my little girl.”  He was under the amiable delusion that time had left her at the ten-mile mark, never to return.

This was one of but many defects in his vision.  He was oblivious of materialistic facts.  He was innocent of the ways of finance.  He had come of a prodigal race of spenders, not accumulators.  Away back somewhere in the line there must have existed what New Englanders term a “good provider,” but that virtue had not descended from father to son.  The original vast Desha estates decreased with every generation, seldom a descendant making even a spasmodic effort to replenish them.  There was always a mortgage or sale in progress.  Sometimes a lucrative as well as love-marriage temporarily increased the primal funds, but more often the opposite was the case.