"Did you come all the way from Italy just to sell our old house, Mr. Corliss?"
"Perhaps that was part of why I came," he said, gayly. "I need a great deal of money, Miss Cora Madison."
"For your villa and your yacht?"
"No; I'm a magician, dear lady----"
"Yes," she said, almost angrily. "Of course you know it!"
"You mock me! No; I'm going to make everybody rich who will trust me. I have a secret, and it's worth a mountain of gold.
I've put all I have into it, and will put in everything else I can get for myself, but it's going to take a great deal more than that. And everybody who goes into it will come out on Monte Cristo's island."
"Then I'm sorry papa hasn't anything to put in," she said.
"But he has: his experience in business and his integrity. I want him to be secretary of my company. Will you help me to get him?" he laughed.
"Do you want me to?" she asked with a quick, serious glance straight in his eyes, one which he met admirably.
"I have an extremely definite impression," he said lightly, "that you can make anybody you know do just what you want him to."
"And I have another that you have still another `extremely definite impression' that takes rank over that," she said, but not with his lightness, for her tone was faintly rueful. "It is that you can make ME do just what you want me to."
Mr. Valentine Corliss threw himself back on the bench and laughed aloud. "What a girl!" he cried. Then for a fraction of a second he set his hand over hers, an evanescent touch at which her whole body started and visibly thrilled.
She lifted her gloved hand and looked at it with an odd wonder; her alert emotions, always too ready, flinging their banners to her cheeks again.
"Oh, I don't think it's soiled," he said, a speech which she punished with a look of starry contempt. For an instant she made him afraid that something had gone wrong with his measuring tape; but with a slow movement she set her hand softly against her hot cheek; and he was reassured: it was not his touching her that had offended her, but the allusion to it.
"Thanks," he said, very softly.
She dropped her hand to her parasol, and began, musingly, to dig little holes in the gravel of the path. "Richard Lindley is looking for investments," she said.
"I'm glad to hear he's been so successful," returned Corliss.
"He might like a share in your gold-mine."
"Thank heaven it isn't literally a gold-mine," he exclaimed.
"There have been so many crooked ones exploited I don't believe you could get anybody nowadays to come in on a real one. But I think you'd make an excellent partner for an adventurer who had discovered hidden treasure; and I'm that particular kind of adventurer. I think I'll take you in."
"Do you?"
"How would you like to save a man from being ruined?"
"Ruined? You don't mean it literally?"
"Literally!" He laughed gayly. "If I don't `land' this I'm gone, smashed, finished--quite ended! Don't bother, I'm going to `land' it. And it's rather a serious compliment I'm paying you, thinking you can help me. I'd like to see a woman--just once in the world--who could manage a thing like this." He became suddenly very grave. "Good God! wouldn't I be at her feet!"
Her eyes became even more eager. "You think I--I MIGHT be a woman who could?"
"Who knows, Miss Madison? I believe----" He stopped abruptly, then in a lowered, graver voice asked: "Doesn't it somehow seem a little queer to you when we call each other, `Miss Madison' and `Mr. Corliss'?"
"Yes," she answered slowly; "it does."
"Doesn't it seem to you," he went on, in the same tone, "that we only `Miss' and `Mister' each other in fun? That though you never saw me until yesterday, we've gone pretty far beyond mere surfaces? That we did in our talk, last night?"
"Yes," she repeated; "it does."
He let a pause follow, and then said huskily:
"How far are we going?"
