Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/202

 "Well—I've saved it out of what I borrowed from Aunt Jane, this winter."

"Yes, but it's yours. You borrowed it." He tossed a smelt into the pan, with a resigned bitterness. "They refuse to lend me a cent."

Don, his ears tingling, pretended to be silently absorbed in the setting of the table; he foresaw some of the difficulties that would develop out of this situation in which his uncle had placed him, and he disliked the double part which he would have to play. His life seemed to him to be becoming confusingly complex, with this duplicity in his relation with Conroy and with the difficulty of obtaining work by a straightforward application for it. Pittsey's insidious pursuit of a place on a newspaper seemed to him too patiently crafty. There was something degrading in such a crawling policy.

This was of a piece with the Quixotism which had kept him going, day after day, to old Mr. Vandever, the philanthropic agent of an anonymous millionaire, who was in need of a private secretary—according to Mr. Vandever—and who had commissioned Mr. Vandever, among other things, to find a suitable young man for the position. Don had watched a score of other applicants for the place file from the waiting-room into Mr. Vandever's office, not to reappear; but when he followed, in his turn, he was received by that benevolent old gentleman with a quick smile of relief that was an unspoken acceptance of him as the single likely applicant among all these impossible ones. When he had given up his $3 registration fee—"which