knew—or at least knew about—your father, some years ago."
"She told me that."
"And she knows Gasper Farrington. She asked me a queer question, Ralph."
"What was it, mother?"
"If father did not once own twenty thousand dollars in railroad bonds, and if we had ever got them."
Ralph stopped eating for a moment.
"She said that, did she?" he murmured. "Mother, wouldn't it be strange if she knew something about those bonds?"
"She does."
"How do you know?"
"Because she admitted it. Mrs. Davis was very much agitated. She seemed on the point constantly of telling me something, and then she would mutter to herself and apparently change her mind. When she went away she looked at me very strangely and said: 'Mrs. Fairbanks, when I get the money from my sister to pay your son back the ten dollars he has so kindly loaned me, I am going to tell him a little story about those twenty thousand dollars bonds that may interest him.'"
The bonds formed the topic of conversation for mother and son for nearly an hour after that.
