dollars as you or I would know what to do with, a queer old chap who
lounges about the mountains and looks as if he might have anything but
money. We met the son and the old man at one of their mines yesterday.
They have a private car as large as Shepler's and even more sybaritic,
and they'd been making a tour of inspection over their properties. They
lunched with us. Knowing the Milbreys, you will divine the warmth of
their behaviour toward the son. It was too funny at first. Avice was
the only one to suspect at once that he was the very considerable
personage he is, and so she promptly sequestered him, with a skill born
of her long practice, in the depths of the earth, somewhere near China,
I fancy. Her dear parents were furious. Dressed as one of the miners
they took him to be an employee. The whole party, taking the cue from
outraged parenthood, treated him icily when he emerged from one of
those subterranean galleries with that tender sprig of girlishness.
That is, we were icy until, on the way up, he remaining in the depths,
Avice's dear mother began to rebuke the thoughtless minx for her
indiscretion of strolling through the earth with a working person. Then
Avice, sweet chatterbox, with joyful malice revealed that the young
man, whose name none of us had caught, was Bines, and that he owned the
mine we were in, and she didn't know how many others, nor did she
believe he knew himself. You should have felt the temperature rise. It
went up faster than we were going.

By the time we reached the surface the two Milbreys wore looks that
would have made the angel of peace and good-will look full of hatred
and distrust. Nothing would satisfy them but that we wait to thank the
young Croesus for his courtesy. I waited because I remembered the
daughter, and Oldaker and the Angstead twins waited out of decency. And
when the genius of the mine appeared from out his golden catacombs we
fell upon him in desperate kindness.