each day the mail man left letters and packages at the door. Bert felt obscurely that some change was impending. Night after night he went to sleep lulled by the indistinct murmur of his father's and his mother's voices from downstairs; and twice, in the morning, he found the dining-room table littered with papers closely covered with figures. Once he studied one of the sheets. Here and there, all over it, were dollar signs.
"Mother?" he asked, "what's this?"
His mother took the papers and informed him, jestingly, that curiosity had once killed a cat. But he noticed that she put the papers away carefully. Something was afoot, and he was being barred from the secret. He resented it.
That night a problem in algebra baffled him. He appealed to his father for help.
"I'm busy," Mr. Quinby said absently. "You'll have to paddle your own canoe to-night, Bert."
There was no reason for him to be hurt; yet this was the first time he had come for help and had failed to find it. First, secrets from which he was barred, and now—this. A stubborn line formed around his mouth. He went back to his chair, closed his book and pushed it aside. The man, frowning over a letter he was writing, did not observe what the boy had done. Bert went sullenly to bed.
For two days the sullen mood marked him for its own. Then at the breakfast table, he found
