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The caller is adding together the mills, pineries, elevators, hotels, steamers, steel mills, quarries and railroads that Judge Wandrell owned on the great lakes. The pleasant-faced lady thinks her caller ought to go. He is angry at her. He shows it. He blames her as much as he does Tarpion. He retreats reluctantly. A stranger is in possession of the home of David Lockwin.
If David Lockwin had planned to increase all his prospects, and if all his plans had worked with precision, he could in nowise have pushed his interests more powerfully than by marrying Esther Wandrell. It might have been said of Lockwin that he was impractical; that he was a dreamer. He had done singular things. He had not studied the ways of public opinion.
Men with jet-black hair, eyes and beard would be equally foolish. The lady would listen politely to both. "It is the Manitoba cold wave!" the lovers would lament as they left her. To see Esther Wandrell pass by beautiful, heroic, composed was to feel she was the most magnetic of women.
Often has the beautiful Esther Wandrell smiled upon the young men upon rich and poor alike. Why is she, at twenty-seven years of age, rich, magnificent and unmarried? Ask her mother, who married at fifteen. Ask the father, who for ten years worried to think his only child might go away from him at any day. "I tell you," says Dr. Tarpion, "Harpwood will get her, and get her to-night.
It is pleasant, this riding down Prairie avenue to one's wedding. "Splendid! Splendid!" cries the ardent soldier of fortune, as the blaze of the Wandrell mansion flashes through the plate-glass windows, of his carriage. It is the largest private residence in the city. "Splendid!" he repeats, and leaps out on the curb. A messenger is hurrying away. "Is that Esther on the portico?
Will you be a mother to my little boy? He is lonesome while I am gone!" The matter is settled. It has come by surprise. If David Lockwin had foreseen it, he would have left the field open to Harpwood. If Esther Wandrell had foreseen it, she would have shunned David Lockwin. It is her dearest hope, and yet
Esther Wandrell was pleased to be in the society of either David Lockwin or George Harpwood. David Lockwin she knew. He was socially her equal. He had lived in Chicago as long as she. He was essentially the man she might love, for there was an element of unrest in his nature that corresponded with the turmoil underneath her calm exterior.
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