I will leave it to you to get this twenty-five hundred
dollars from Henry and pay my niece cash for the car. Doesn't that
strike you as a perfectly safe and sane proposition?"
Had a vista of paradise opened up before Mr. Poundstone, he could not
have been more thrilled. He had been absolutely honest in his plea to
Mrs. Poundstone that he could not afford a thirty-two-hundred-and-
fifty-dollar sedan, much as he longed to oblige her and gain a
greatly to be desired peace. And now the price was dangling before
his eyes, so to speak. At any rate it was parked in the porte-cochere
not fifty feet distant!
For the space of a minute the Mayor weighed his son's future as a
corporation attorney against his own future as mayor of Sequoia--and
Henry lost.
"It might be arranged, Colonel," he murmured in a low voice--the
voice of shame.
"It is already arranged," the Colonel replied cheerfully. "Leave your
jit at the front gate and drive home in Shirley's car. I'll arrange
matters with her." He laughed shortly. "It means, of course, that
I'll have to telegraph to San Francisco to-morrow and buy her a later
model. Thank goodness, she has a birthday to-morrow! Have a fresh
cigar, Mayor."
Riding home that night in Shirley Sumner's car Mrs. Poundstone leaned
suddenly toward her husband, threw a fat arm around his neck and
kissed him.
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