For it was Anne who was the driving force of the family!  Anne who had planned the great campaign, and selected the Lamson palace, and pried the family loose from the primeval rocks of Nevada!  She was cold as an iceberg, tireless, pitiless to others as to herself; for seventeen years her father had wandered and dug among the mountains; and for seventeen years, if need be, she would dig beneath the walls of the fortress of Society!

After Montague had had his heart to heart talk with the mother, Miss Anne Evans became very haughty toward him; whereby he knew that the old lady had told about it, and that the daughter resented his presumption.  But to Oliver she laid bare her soul, and Oliver would come and tell his brother about it:  how she plotted and planned and studied, and brought new schemes to him every week.  She had some of the real people bought over to secret sympathy with her; if there was some especial favour which she asked for, she would set to work with the good-natured old man, and the person would have some important money service done him.  She had the people of Society all marked—­she was learning all their weaknesses, and the underground passages of their lives, and working patiently to find the key to her problem—­some one family which was socially impregnable, but whose finances were in such a shape that they would receive the proposition to take up the Evanses, and definitely put them in.  Montague used to look back upon all this with wonder and amusement—­from those days in the not far distant future, when the papers had cable descriptions of the gowns of the Duchess of Arden, nee Evans, who was the bright particular star of the London social season!

CHAPTER XIV

Montague had written a reluctant letter to Major Thorne, telling him that he had been unable to interest anyone in his proposition, and that he was not in position to undertake it himself.  Then, according to his brother’s injunction, he left his money in the bank, and waited.  There would be “something doing” soon, said Oliver.

And as they drove home from the Evanses’, Oliver served notice upon him that this event might be expected any day.  He was very mysterious about it, and would answer none of his brother’s questions—­except to say that it had nothing to do with the people they had just visited.

“I suppose,” Montague remarked, “you have not failed to realize that Evans might play you false.”

And the other laughed, echoing the words, “Might do it!” Then he went on to tell the tale of the great railroad builder of the West, whose daughter had been married, with elaborate festivities; and some of the young men present, thinking to find him in a sentimental mood, had asked him for his views about the market.  He advised them to buy the stock of his road; and they formed a pool and bought, and as fast as they bought, he sold—­until the little venture cost the boys a total of seven million and a half!