Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/23

Rh Shore Drive, a few miles from the centre of the city, where great, handsome winter homes bound the beach, with here and there an apartment building, taller but no less handsome than the houses. Latham ran his car to the boulevard curb before one of these buildings. The two men went in together and ascended in the electric elevator to the floor where Geoff and his sister dwelt.

The large living room of the apartment, with its sun room overlooking the lake, plainly proclaimed itself as the dwelling of young people with many active interests. There were books, ornaments and pieces of furniture that told of a prosperous, cultured and vigorous older generation; but that generation had passed. It was represented directly only by a pair of quietly framed photographs of a date some three years before. Geoff's father and mother had been lost together in a train wreck; so he and his sister had lived there alone, governing themselves and each other after their own fashion.

The only person who could assert any claim to right of interference with them was then in