“And you are just as handsome!”
He smiled down upon her.
“Maisie accused me of being too old to remember what true love was,” he said. “Do you think so, dear?—Have we forgotten?”
“Darling!” she whispered, as she snuggled close against him.
They kissed, believing that their kiss was just the kiss of twenty years ago. It wasn’t. It was a symbol of infinitely more.
* * * * * *
He sat tapping his foot impatiently on the carpet of the ante-room to the council-chamber of the Daily Rostrum. Behind the closed door a meeting of the chief proprietors was in secret deliberation. He glanced at his watch, his dignity fretting at this unwonted exclusion, an unacknowledged anxiety unsettling his nerves. He knew himself to be on the threshold of a new epoch. An enterprising, young-blooded syndicate was acquiring the Daily Rostrum, was even then in conclave with the old proprietors, agreeing upon the final terms. They had sent for him—had asked him (oh, most courteously!) to give them yet five minutes.
But he was resentful of those five minutes. Young Henry Vancoutter (not so very young now, though—he must be forty!—Let me see—twenty years——), the chief proprietor, ought to have treated him with more consideration. He deserved better than to be left cooling his heels while the destinies of his paper—his paper, for he if any one had made it, had lived for it for forty years, had been its unchallenged autocrat for thirty—were in the balance. The old man would never have done it, he thought, resentful of this rising generation. Never once was old Vancoutter lacking in the respect due to him, the prince of editors who had made his property one of the most valuable in the journalistic world.
He wondered what the future would bring. Doubtless the policy of the paper would be changed—that was only natural, of course. They must go ahead with the times (he nerved himself for an effort that he felt would be a tax upon his strength). Yes—perhaps they had fallen a bit behind of late. The circulation was not what it was—not half what it had been fifteen years ago. They had made rather a virtue of being a trifle old-fashioned, appealing to conservative instincts. Not in the old days, certainly—but for the last twenty years. And undoubtedly they had suffered from it. He must look up the side-lines a bit—the radio-service to private subscribers, for example. He drifted on to a vague calculation of the initial cost for the service of wirelessed cinema-pictures of current events, mingled with advertisements, with which their go-ahead rival the Lightning News was making so great success with hotels and flat communities. His jaw set. He would beat them on their own ground. He would show the world that the editor of the Rostrum was still alive, was still a power.
Yes—he was not done yet. He could not—no one could—conceive the Rostrum without him. He was the paper itself. There was not the faintest possibility of his being replaced. It was unthinkable as practical near politics, as unimaginable as death itself. Such a day was, thank God, still remote. Old proprietors or new, there was no question that he was the indispensable editor. But he would have to put his shoulder to the wheel.