"In relation to Corvet, Sherrill, and Spearman, Connie—the company that involves your interests and your father's and mine and the interests of many other people—small stockholders who have no influence in its management, and whose interests I have to look after for them. A good many of them, you know, are our own men—our old skippers and mates and families of men who have died in our service and who left their savings in stock in our ships."
"I don't understand, Henry."
"I've had to think of Conrad this morning in the same way as I've had to think of Ben Corvet of recent years—as a threat against the interests of those people."
Her color rose, and her pulse quickened. Henry never had talked to her, except in the merest commonplaces, about his relations with Uncle Benny; it was a matter in which, she had recognized, they had been opposed; and since the quarrels between the old friend whom she had loved from childhood and him, who wished to become now more than a mere friend to her, had grown more violent, she had purposely avoided mentioning Uncle Benny to Henry, and he, quite as consciously, had avoided mentioning Mr. Corvet to her.
"I've known for a good many years," Spearman said reluctantly, "that Ben Corvet's brain was seriously affected. He recognized that himself even earlier, and admitted it to himself when he took me off my ship to take charge of the company. I might have gone with other people then, or it wouldn't have been very long before I could have started in as a ship owner myself; but, in view of his condition, Ben made me promises that offered me most. Afterwards his
