Free The Lost Prince by Selden Edwards

to be done and pursued the solution with great inner strength, a kind of blind courage, and that courage, strong as it was, also had a dark consequence that now was going to lead to her ruination.
    A more cautious person, a timid person even, would not find herself in this situation, she kept saying to herself. A more cautious person would not have put Acorn Street at risk.
    “You will spend your entire life here,” her father had said to her in one of their last conversations. “This house is a fine old Boston landmark,” he said. “And now you will be its center, raising your family here, as you have been raised, making your mother and her forebears proud.”
    That was Acorn Street. And now, because of her fevered devotion to the imperious mandate of the journal she had brought back from her fateful encounters in Vienna, she had risked all and had lost her beloved childhood home.
    It was during that night of torment that the dream first came to Eleanor. She was alone on a cold and windswept promontory, a high cliff on the edge of a raging ocean. She was drawn to the edge by a distant figure in white, and as she approached, she was aware of the figure falling far below into what now appeared as a bottomless void. Trying to steady herself, digging her fingers into the muddy surface, Eleanor felt herself slipping as she stared into the dark abyss. It was always at this point that she would waken, in a cold sweat, fighting for breath.
    She bore the news secretly and alone, waiting for the axe to fall and for the word to come from Cincinnati to her bank, when she would have to tell Frank Burden and the world that she had lost her family home. Sheput the decision off for days, and then finally one morning, after a sleepless night, she decided she must act. And it was that very morning that she read shocking news in a small column in the
Boston Herald
. At first she could not believe what she saw, that a circumstance so central in her life would appear in her Boston newspaper, but there it was: Homer Smith, prominent Cincinnati businessman, a Harvard alumnus, it turned out, was dead, felled by a heart attack in his office, and now Procter and Gamble, the greedy giant, spread its tentacles over Cincinnati Soap and Candle Company and, in the old patriarch’s view, threatened to suck out its life. In the ensuing takeover attempt, which the family had enough sense to ward off, one of Homer Smith’s nephews seemed to take control. Eleanor did not travel to Cincinnati this time, but spoke to the young man on the telephone.
    “What have you planned?” she said when he asked about her holdings.
    “We have contacted Colgate,” he said. “They are definitely interested.”
    That action on the family’s part set up a bidding war between the two companies. Procter and Gamble acted aggressively and hastily, “before the Colgate folks could even put together an offer,” the nephew said in the second phone call. “They are offering a price that will double in value our holdings in stock. They very much want Workman’s Soap.”
    “And what do you plan to do?” Eleanor asked.
    “Why, we’ll sell, of course,” the nephew said in a burst, not acknowledging any humor in her question. And then he paused. “I hope that is satisfactory with you.”
    “Thank you for inquiring,” she said, registering fully only much later the mature consideration in his tone. “And, yes, it is satisfactory with me.”
    After the packet arrived special delivery from Cincinnati, Eleanor made the trip back to Mr. Lowenstein’s office on Boylston Street. “I trust that I can pay you in Procter and Gamble stock,” she said.
    “Oh my, yes,” the kindly banker said. “That stock is like gold right now.”
    Eleanor flashed him a look of concern. “For a moment, it looked as if my investment was going to fail, and I was going to lose my family home.”
    Mr. Lowenstein gave her a long appraising look, then smiled. “Oh my, no. We would have found a