Page:Love Insurance - Earl Biggers (1914).djvu/79

60 soul. For a bald head could recall but one thing—Jephson.

He strode from the window, savagely kicking an innocent suit-case that got in his way. What mean trick was this fate had played him as he entered San Marco? To show to him the one girl in all her glory and sweetness, to thrill him through and through with his discovery—and then to send the girl scurrying off to announce her engagement to another man! Scurvy, he called it. But scurvier still, that it should be the very engagement he had hastened to San Marco to bring to its proper close—"I do," and Mendelssohn.

He sat gloomily down on the bed. What could he do? What save keep his word, given on the seventeenth floor of an office building in New York? No man had yet had reason to question the good faith of a Minot. His dead father, at the beginning of his career, had sacrificed his fortune to keep his word, and gone back with a smile to begin all over again. What could he do?

Nothing, save grit his teeth and see the thing