“Who’s this Miss Dexter?” O’Gar took up the inquiry.
“She’s well—” Charles Gantvoort hesitated. “Well, father was on very friendly terms with her and her brother. He usually called on them—on her several evenings a week. In fact, I suspected that he intended marrying her.”
“Who and what is she?”
“Father became acquainted with them six or seven months ago. I’ve met them several times, but don’t know them very well. Miss Dexter—Creda is her given name—is about twenty-three years old, I should judge, and her brother Madden is four or five years older. He is in New York now, or on his way there, to transact some business for father.”
“Did your father tell you he was going to marry her?” O’Gar hammered away at the woman angle.
“No; but it was pretty obvious that he was very much—ah—infatuated. We had some words over it a few days ago—last week. Not a quarrel, you understand, but words. From the way he talked I feared that he meant to marry her.”
“What do you mean ‘feared’?” O’Gar snapped at that word.
Charles Gantvoort’s pale face flushed a little, and he cleared his throat embarrassedly.
“I don’t want to put the Dexters in a bad light to you. I don’t think—I’m sure they had nothing to do with father’s—with this. But I didn’t care especially for them—didn’t like them. I thought they were—well—fortune hunters, perhaps. Father wasn’t fabulously wealthy, but he had considerable means. And, while he wasn’t feeble, still he was past fifty-seven, old enough for me to feel that Creda Dexter was more interested in his money than in him.”