"Well, why don't you go on?" asked Mr. Keeler, as Roy paused.

"You've heard something about the affair. I can see you have by the way you look. Please tell me what it was."

"Only a very little," was the reply. "As I was crossing the trestle in the train a while ago I heard a lady behind me telling a gentleman who was with her that this was the place where Roy Pell rescued the old miser. So now you see I know who you are, but I hope that won't make any difference about your telling the story. You left off in the most interesting place. It would be worse than the serials in the weekly papers, for I couldn't look forward to getting the continuation next Saturday."

Roy smiled and then said "All right, you've promised not to use it unless I give you leave, you know. But I don't want you to think of me as a regular hero because I lugged that old man off the bridge. There would have been plenty of time for me to have run down to Burdock and stopped the train and got help there, but I really didn't think of it."

"Oh, no, that isn't the part I'm interested in at all. What I want to know is the reason you seemed so glum over having come into a fortune. Was it much, may I inquire?"

"About half a million, but I haven't been one mite happier since we've had it. In the first place my oldest brother has been sick ever since. We don't know what's the matter with him and he won't give up his law business and go away for rest as mother wants him to. He says he has got too much to do looking after the investing of her money. Then there's Rex, he wants so many things that he can't settle on any one. He got a bicycle almost the first thing, and now he's tired of it and wants a horse, and Jess says there's no good of getting that because we ought to go to Europe and take Syd with us."

"And Eva, she wants to go to Vassar, and mother doesn't want to give her up, and the worst of it all is we've sold the place and we are going to move into the city next month, and I hate to leave Marley, although the rest all want to go. So we're all pulling different ways, and nobody a bit happy, for if he's got what he wanted he has to remember that it's what the rest didn't want. I had a fling out about the whole thing just before I left the house and I came down to grumble to the creek. Why, that's funny!"

"What's funny?" inquired Mr. Keeler, as Roy looked up with a half smile.

"Why, it's just a month ago to-day since Rex came down here to mope because we didn't have money enough to let him go on a trip to Canada, and now I've come here to do the same thing because we're come into a fortune."

"Then you don't care for the money?" remarked the author.

"Not if it's going to break up a family the way it has ours. Jess used to be awfully lively and full of fun, and now she's all the time talking about new clothes and the places she wants to go, and how she's going to have her room decorated in the new house."

"But I thought you said she wanted to go to Europe."

"So I did. That's one of the troubles. She don't know what she wants. It's one thing one minute and another the next."

"But your mother? Doesn't she have something to say about it?"

"Yes, but she's so fond of us all, she wants to do what will give us the most pleasure. And of course when we all want different things that's pretty hard to do."

"And the 'different thing' that I want is to stay right here in Marley. I'd graduate at the academy here next June, and then all my friends are here, and I like the country. Now if your hero in a story was in a fix like this what would you do with him?"

"It depends on the sort of story I was writing. If it was one with a motive, a moral, so to speak, I'd have him give up his own desire and say he'd be perfectly willing to do what the rest wanted to do."

"But if the rest wanted to do different things? Here's Rex wanting to live in Philadelphia, and Eva thinking it would be ever so much nicer to live in Boston, and Jess divided half of the time between New York and Europe, and Sydney looking as if he'd drop into the grave right off if we didn't do something quick-- what then?"

Roy spoke very earnestly, and Mr. Keeler did not smile this time. He began to pick at the bark on the tree trunk and did not reply for some little time after Roy had paused.

"I think," he said finally, "that in that case I should have had my hero try to make himself contented with whichever decision was arrived at. Half a million ought to atone for a great many drawbacks."

"Oh, I kno............