Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

The Ball of Fire

For an instant the brown eyes and the blue ones met

The Ball of Fire

By

George Randolph Chester

and

Lillian Chester

Illustrated

Hearst’s International Library Co.

New York                      1914

Copyright, 1914, by

The Red Book Corporation

Copyright, 1914, by

Hearst’s International Library Co., Inc.

All Rights reserved, including the translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

The Ball of Fire

CHAPTER I
NO PLACE FOR SENTIMENT

Silence pervaded the dim old aisles of Market Square Church; a silence which seemed to be palpable; a solemn hush which wavered, like the ghostly echoes of anthems long forgotten, among the slender columns and the high arches and the delicate tracery of the groining; the winter sun, streaming through the clerestory windows, cast, on the floor and on the vacant benches, patches of ruby and of sapphire, of emerald and of topaz, these seeming only to accentuate the dimness and the silence.

A thin, wavering, treble note, so delicate that it seemed like a mere invisible cobweb of a tone, stole out of the organ loft and went pulsing up amid the dim arches. It grew in volume; it added a diapason; a deep, soft bass joined it, and then, subdued, but throbbing with the passion of a lost soul, it swelled into one of the noble preludes of Bach. The organ rose in a mighty crescendo to a peal which shook the very edifice; then it stopped with an abruptness which was uncanny, so much so that the silence which ensued was oppressive. In that silence the vestry door creaked, it opened wide, and it was as if a vision had suddenly been set there! Framed in the dark doorway against the background of the sun-flooded vestry, bathed in the golden light from the transept window, brown-haired, brown-eyed, rosy-cheeked, stood a girl who might have been one of the slender stained-glass virgins come to life, the golden light flaming the edges of her hair into an oriole. She stood timidly, peering into the dimness, and on her beautifully curved lips was a half questioning smile.

“Uncle Jim,” she called, and there was some quality in her low voice which was strangely attractive; and disturbing.

“By George, Gail, I forgot that you were to come for me!” said Jim Sargent, rising from amid the group of men in the dim transept. “The decorators drove us out of the vestry.”

“They drove me out, too,” laughed the vision, stepping from her frame.

“We are delighted that they drove you in here,” quoth the tall, young Reverend Smith Boyd, who had accomplished the rare art of bowing gracefully in a Prince Albert.

She smiled her acknowledgment of the compliment, and glanced uncertainly at the awe-inspiring vestry meeting, then she turned toward the door.

“My niece, Miss Gail Sargent, gentlemen,” announced Jim Sargent, with entirely justifiable pride, and, beaming until his bald spot seemed to glow with an added shine, he introduced her to each of the gentlemen present, with the exception of Smith Boyd, whom she had met that morning.

“What a pity Saint Paul didn’t see you,” remarked silver-bearded Rufus Manning, calmly appropriating the vision and ushering her into the pew between himself and her uncle. “He never would have said it.”

“That women should not sit in council with the men?” she laughed, looking into the blue eyes of patriarchal Manning. “Are you sure I won’t be in the way?”

“Not at all,” round-headed old Nicholas Van Ploon immediately assured her. He had popped his eyes open with a jerk at the entrance of Gail, and had not since been able to close them to their normal almond shape. He sat now uncomfortably twisted so that he could face her, and his cheeks were reddening with the exertion, which had wrinkled his roundly filled vest. The young rector contemplated her gravely. He was not quite pleased.

“We’ll be through in a few minutes, Gail,” promised Jim Sargent. “Allison, you were about to prove something to us, I think,” and he leaned forward to smile across Gail at Rufus Manning.

“Prove is the right word,” agreed the stockily built man who had evidently been addressing the vestry. He was acutely conscious of the presence of Gail, as they all were. “Your rector suggests that this is a matter of sentiment. You are anxious to have fifty million dollars to begin the erection of a cathedral; but I came here to talk business, and that only. Granting you the full normal appreciation of your Vedder Court property, and the normal increase of your aggregate rentals, you can not have, at the end of ten years, a penny over forty-two millions. I am prepared to offer you, in cash, a sum which will, at three and a half per cent., and in ten years, produce that exact amount. To this I add two million.”

“How much did you allow for increase in the value of the property?” asked Nicholas Van Ploon, whose only knowledge for several generations had been centred on this one question. The original Van Ploon had bought a vast tract of Manhattan for a dollar an acre, and, by that stroke of towering genius, had placed the family of Van Ploon, for all eternity, beyond the necessity of thought.

For answer, Allison passed him the envelope upon which he had been figuring, checking off an item as he did so. He noticed that Gail’s lips twitched with suppressed mirth. She turned abruptly to look back at the striking transept window, and the three vestrymen in the rear pew immediately sat straighter. Willis Cunningham, who was a bachelor, hastily smoothed his Vandyke. He was so rich, by inheritance, that money meant nothing to him.

“Not enough,” grunted Van Ploon, handing back the envelope, and twisting again in the general direction of Gail.

“Ample,” retorted Allison. “You can’t count anything for the buildings. While I don’t deny that they yield the richest income of any property in the city, they are the most decrepit tenements in New York. They’ll fall down in less than ten years. You have them propped up now.”

Jim Sargent glanced solicitously at Gail, but she did not seem to be bored; not a particle!

“They are passed by the building inspector annually,” pompously stated W. T. Chisholm, his mutton chops turning pink from the reddening of the skin beneath. He had spent a lifetime in resenting indignities before they reached him.

“Building inspectors change,” insinuated Allison. “Politics is very uncertain.”

Four indignant vestrymen jerked forward to answer that insult.

“Gentlemen, this is a vestry meeting,” sternly reproved the Reverend Smith Boyd, advancing a step, and seeming to feel the need of a gavel. His rich, deep baritone explained why he was rector of the richest church in the world.

Gail’s eyes were dancing, but otherwise she was demureness itself as she studied, in turns, the members of the richest vestry in the world. She estimated that eight of the gentlemen then present were almost close enough to the anger line to swear. They numbered just eight, and they were most interesting! And this was a vestry meeting!

“The topic of debate was money, I believe,” suggested Manning, rescuing his sense of humour from somewhere in his beard. He was the infidel member. “Suppose we return to it. Is Allison’s offer worth considering?”

“Why?” inquired the nasal voice of clean-shaven old Joseph G. Clark, who was sarcastic in money matters. The Standard Cereal Company had attained its colossal dimensions through rebates; and he had invented the device! “The only reason we’d sell to Allison would be that we could get more money than by the normal return from our investment.”

The thinly spun treble note began once more, pulsing its timid way among the high, dim arches, as if seeking a lodgment where it might fasten its tiny thread of harmony, and grow into a masterful composition. A little old lady came slowly down the centre aisle of the nave, in rich but modest black, struggling, against her infirmities, to walk with a trace of the erect gracefulness of her bygone youth. Gail, listening raptly to the delicately increasing throb of the music, followed, in abstraction, the slow progress of the little old lady, who seemed to carry with her, for just a moment, a trace of the solemn hush belonging to that perspective of slender columns which spread their gracefully pointed arches up into the groined twilight, where the music hovered until it could gather strength to burst into full song. The little old lady turned her gaze for an instant to the group in the transept, and subconsciously gave the folds of her veil a touch; then she slipped into her pew, down near the altar, and raised her eyes to the exquisite Henri Dupres crucifix. She knelt, and bowed her forehead on her hands.

“I’ve allowed two million for the profit of Market Square Church in dealing with me,” stated Allison, again proffering the envelope which no one made a move to take. “I will not pay a dollar more.”

W. T. Chisholm was suddenly reminded that the vestry had a moral obligation in the matter under discussion. He was president of the Majestic Trust Company, and never forgot that fact.

“To what use would you devote the property of Market Square Church?” he gravely asked.

“The erection of a terminal station for all the municipal transportation in New York,” answered Allison; “subways, elevateds, surface cars, traction lines! The proposition should have the hearty co-operation of every citizen.”

Simple little idea, wasn’t it? Gail had to think successively to comprehend what a stupendous enterprise this was; and the man talked about it as modestly as if he were planning to sod a lawn; more so! Why, back home, if a man dreamed a dream so vast as that, he just talked about it for the rest of his life; and they put a poet’s wreath on his tombstone.

“Now you’re talking sentiment,” retorted stubby-moustached Jim Sargent. “You said, a while ago, that you came here strictly on business. So did we. This is no place for sentiment.”

Rufus Manning, with the tip of his silvery beard in his fingers, looked up into the delicate groining of the apse, where it curved gracefully forward over the head of the famous Henri Dupres crucifix, and he grinned. Gail Sargent was looking contemplatively from one to the other of the grave vestrymen.

“You’re right,” conceded Allison curtly. “Suppose you fellows talk it over by yourselves, and let me know your best offer.”

“Very well,” assented Jim Sargent, with an indifference which did not seem to be assumed. “We have some other matters to discuss, and we may as well thrash this thing out right now. We’ll let you know to-morrow.”

Gail looked at her watch and rose energetically.

“I shall be late at Lucile’s, Uncle Jim. I don’t think I can wait for you.”

“I’m sorry,” regretted Sargent. “I don’t like to have you drive around alone.”

“I’ll be very happy to take Miss Sargent anywhere she’d like to go,” offered Allison, almost instantaneously.

“Much obliged, Allison,” accepted Sargent heartily; “that is, if she’ll go with you.”

“Thank you,” said Gail simply, as she stepped out of the pew.

The gentlemen of the vestry rose as one man. Old Nicholas Van Ploon even attempted to stand gracefully on one leg, while his vest bulged over the back of the pew in front of him.

“I think we’ll have to make you a permanent member of the vestry,” smiled Manning, the patriarch, as he bowed his adieus. “We’ve been needing a brightening influence for some time.”

Willis Cunningham, the thoughtful one, wedged his Vandyke between the heads of Standard Cereal Clark and Banker Chisholm.

“We hope to see you often, Miss Sargent,” was his thoughtful remark.

“I mean to attend services,” returned Gail graciously, looking up into the organ loft, where the organist was making his third attempt at that baffling run in the Bach prelude.

“You haven’t said how you like our famous old church,” suggested the Reverend Smith Boyd with pleasant ease, though he felt relieved that she was going.

The sudden snap in Gail’s eyes fairly scintillated. It was like the shattering of fine glass in the sunlight.

“It seems to be a remarkably lucrative enterprise,” she smiled up at him, and was rewarded by a snort from Uncle Jim and a chuckle from silvery-bearded Rufus Manning. Allison frankly guffawed. The balance of the sedate vestry was struck dumb by the impertinence.

Gail felt the eyes of the Reverend Smith Boyd fixed steadily on her, and turned to meet them. They were cold. She had thought them blue; but now they were green! She stared back into them for a moment, and a little red spot came into the delicate tint of her oval cheeks; then she turned deliberately to the marvellously beautiful big transept window. It had been designed by the most famous stained-glass artist in the world, and its subject lent itself to a wealth of colour. It was Christ turning the money changers out of the temple!

CHAPTER II
“WHY?”

“Snow!” exclaimed Gail in delight, turning up her face to the delicate flakes. “And the sun shining. That means snow to-morrow!”

Allison helped her into his big, piratical looking runabout, and tucked her in as if she were some fragile hot-house plant which might freeze with the first cool draught. He looked, with keen appreciation, at her fresh cheeks and sparkling eyes and softly waving hair. He had never given himself much time for women, but this girl was a distinct individual. It was not her undeniable beauty which he found so attractive. He had met many beautiful women. Nor was it charm of manner, nor the thing called personal magnetism, nor the intelligence which gleamed from her eyes. It was something intangible and baffling which had chained his interest from the moment she had appeared in the vestry doorway, and since he was a man who had never admitted the existence of mysteries, his own perplexity puzzled him.

“The pretty white snow is no friend of mine,” he assured her, as he took the wheel and headed towards the Avenue. He looked calculatingly into the sky. “This particular downfall is likely to cost the Municipal Transportation Company several thousand dollars.”

“I’m curious to know the commercial value of a sunset in New York,” Gail smiled up at him. Her eyes closed for a swift instant, her long, brown lashes curving down on her cheeks, but beneath them was an infinitesimal gleam; and Allison had the impression that under the cover of her exquisitely veined lids she was looking at him corner-wise, and having a great deal of fun all by herself.

“We haven’t capitalised sunsets yet, but we have hopes,” he laughed.

“Then there’s still a commercial opportunity,” she lightly returned. “I feel quite friendly to money, but it’s so intimate here. I’ve heard nothing else since I came, on Monday.”

“Even in church,” he chuckled. “You delivered a reckless shock to the Reverend Smith Boyd’s vestry.”

“Well?” she demanded. “Didn’t he ask my opinion?”

“I don’t think he’ll make the mistake again,” and Allison took the corner into the Avenue at a speed which made Gail, unused to bare inches of leeway, class Allison as a demon driver. The tall traffic policeman around whose upraised arm they had circled smiled a frank tribute to her beauty, and she felt relieved. She had cherished some feeling that they should be arrested.

“However, even a church must discuss money,” went on Allison, as if he had just decided a problem to which he had given weighty thought.

“Fifty millions isn’t mere money,” retorted Gail; “it’s criminal wealth. If no man can make a million dollars honestly, how can a church?”

Allison swerved out into the centre of the Avenue and passed a red limousine before he answered. He had noticed that everybody in the street stared into his car, and it flattered him immensely to have so pretty a girl with him.

“The wealth of Market Square Church is natural and normal,” he explained. “It arises partly from the increase in value of property which was donated when practically worthless. Judicious investment is responsible for the balance.”

“Oh, bother!” and Gail glanced at him impatiently. “Your natural impulse is to defend wealth because it is wealth; but you know that Market Square Church never should have had a surplus to invest. The money should have been spent in charity. Why are they saving it?”

Allison began to feel the same respect for Gail’s mental processes which he would for a man’s, though, when he looked at her with this thought in mind, she was so thoroughly feminine that she puzzled him more than ever.

“Market Square Church has an ambition worthy of its vestry,” he informed her, bringing his runabout to rest, with a swift glide, just an accurate three inches behind the taxi in front of them. “When it has fifty million dollars, it proposes to start building the most magnificent cathedral on American soil.”

Gail watched the up-town traffic piling around them, wedging them in, packing them tightly on all sides, and felt that they must be hours in extricating themselves from this tangle of shining-bodied vehicles. The skies had turned grey by now, and the snow was thicker in the air. The flakes drove, with a cool, refreshing snap, into her face.

“Why?” she pondered. “Will a fifty million dollar cathedral save souls in proportion to the amount of money invested?”

Allison enjoyed that query thoroughly.

“You must ask the Reverend Smith Boyd,” he chuckled. “You talk like a heathen!”

“I am,” she calmly avowed. “I’ve been a heathen ever since a certain respectable old religious body dropped the theory of infant damnation from its creed. Its body of elders decided to save the souls of unbaptised babies from everlasting hell-fire; and the anti-damnation wing won by three grey-whiskered votes.”

Proper ladies in the nearby cars stared with haughty disapproval at Allison, whose degree of appreciation necessitated a howl. Gail, however, did not join in the mirth. That telltale red spot had appeared in the delicate pink of her checks. She was still angry with the man-made creed which had taught a belief so horrible. The traffic blockade was lifted, and Allison’s clutch slammed. The whole mass of vehicles moved forwards, and in two blocks up the Avenue they had scattered like chaff. Allison darted into an opening between two cars, his runabout skidded, and missed a little electric by a hair’s breadth. He had no personal interest in religion, but he had in Gail.

“So you turned infidel.”

“Oh no,” returned Gail gravely, and with a new tone. “I pray every morning and every night, and God hears me.” The note of reverence in her voice was a thing to which Allison gave instant respect. “I have no quarrel with religion, only with theology. I attend church because its spiritual influence has survived in spite of outgrown rites. I take part in the services, though I will not repeat the creed. Why, Mr. Allison, I love the church, and the most notable man in the future history of the world will be the man who saves it from dead dogma.” Her eyes were glowing, the same eyes which had closed in satirical mischief. Now they were rapt. “What a stunning collie!” she suddenly exclaimed.

Allison, who had followed her with admiring attention, his mind accompanying hers in eager leaps, laughed in relief. After all, she was a girl—and what a girl! The exhilaration of the drive, and of the snow beating in her face, and of the animated conversation, had set the clear skin of her face aglow with colour. Her deep red lips, exquisitely curved and half parted, displayed a row of dazzling white teeth, and the elbow which touched his was magnetic. Allison refused to believe that he was forty-five!

“You’re fond of collies,” he guessed, surprised to find himself with an eager interest in the likes and dislikes of a young girl. It was a new experience.

“I adore them!” she enthusiastically declared. “Back home, I have one of every marking but a pure white.”

There was something tender and wistful in the tone of that “back home.” No doubt she had hosts of friends and admirers there, possibly a favoured suitor. It was quite likely. A girl such as Gail Sargent could hardly escape it. If there was a favoured suitor Allison rather pitied him, for Gail was in the city of strong men. Busy with an entirely new and strange group of thoughts, Allison turned into the Park, and Gail uttered an exclamation of delight as the fresh, keen air whipped in her face. The snow was like a filmy white veil against the bare trees, and enough of it had clung, by now, to outline, with silver pointing, the lacework of branches. On the turf, still green from the open winter, it lay in thin white patches, and squirrels, clad in their sleek winter garments, were already scampering to their beds, crossing the busy drive with the adroitness of accomplished metropolitan pedestrians, their bushy tails hopping behind them in ungainly loops.

The pair in the runabout were silent, for the east drive at this hour was thronged with outward bound machines, and the roadway was slippery with the new-fallen snow. Steady of nerve, keen of eye, firm of hand! Gail watched the alert figure of Allison, tensely and yet easily motionless, in the seat beside her. The terrific swiftness of everything impressed her. Every car was going at top speed, and it seemed that she was in a constant maze of hair-breadth escapes. By and by, however, she found another and a greater marvel; that in all this breathless driving, there was no recklessness. Capability, that was the word for which she had been groping. No man could survive here, and rest his feet upon the under layer, unless he possessed superior ability, superior will, superior strength. She arrived at exactly the same phrase Allison had entertained five minutes before; “the city of strong men!” Again she turned to the man at her side for a critical inspection, in this new light. His frame was powerful, and the square, high forehead, with the bulges of concentration above the brows, showed his mental equipment to be equally as rugged. His profile was a crisply cut silhouette against the wintry grey; straight nose, full, firm lips, pointed chin, square jaw. He was a fair example of all this force.

Perhaps feeling the steady gaze, Allison turned to her suddenly, and for a moment the grey eyes and the brown ones looked questioningly into each other, then there leaped from the man to the woman a something which held her gaze a full second longer than she would have wished.

“Air’s great,” he said with a smile.

“Glorious!” she agreed. “I don’t want to go in.”

“Don’t,” he promptly advised her.

“That’s a simple enough solution,” and her laugh, in the snow-laden air, reminded him, in one of those queer flashes of memory, of a little string of sleighbells he had owned as a youngster. “However, I promised Cousin Lucile.”

“We’ll stop at the house long enough to tell her you’re busy,” suggested Allison, as eager as a boy. He had been on his way home to dress for a business banquet, but such affairs came often, and impulsive adventures like this could be about once in a lifetime with him. He had played the grubbing game so assiduously that, while he had advanced, as one of his lieutenants said, from a street car strap to his present mastership of traction facilities, he had missed a lot of things on the way. He was energetic to make up for the loss, however. He felt quite ready to pour a few gallons of gasolene into his runabout and go straight on to Boston, or any other place Gail might suggest; and there was an exhilaration in his voice which was contagious.

“Let’s!” cried Gail, and, with a laugh which he had discarded with his first business promotion, Allison threw out another notch of speed, and whirled from the Seventy-second Street entrance up the Avenue to the proper turning, and halfway down the block, where he made a swift but smooth stop, bringing the step with marvellous accuracy to within an inch of the curb.

“Won’t you come in?” invited Gail.

“We’d stay too long,” grinned Allison, entering into the conspiracy with great fervour.

She flashed at him a smile and ran up the steps. She turned to him again as she waited for the bell to be answered, and nodded to him with frank comradery.

“Time me,” she called, and he jerked out his watch as she slipped in at the door.

Two vivacious looking young women, one tall and black-haired and the other petite and blonde, and both fashionably slender and both pretty, rushed out into the hall and surrounded her.

“We thought you’d never come,” rattled Lucile Teasdale, who was the petite blonde, and the daughter of the sister of the wife of Gail’s Uncle Jim.

“Who’s the man?” demanded Mrs. “Arly” Fosland, with breathless interest.

“Where’s my tea?” answered Gail.

“We saw you dash up,” supplemented Lucile. “We thought it was a fire.”

“Why doesn’t he come in?” this from Arly, in whom two years of polite married life had not destroyed an innocently eager curiosity to inspect eligibles at close range, for her friends.

“Who is he?” insisted Lucile, peeping out of the hall window.

“Edward E. Allison,” primly announced Gail, suppressing a giggle. “I got him at Uncle Jim’s vestry meeting. He’s waiting to take me riding in the Park. Where’s my tea?”

“Edward E. Allison!” gasped “Arly” Fosland. “Why, he’s the richest bachelor in New York, even if he isn’t a social butterfly,” and she contemplated Gail in sisterly wonder and admiration. “Good gracious, child, run!”

“Come for the tea to-morrow!” urged Lucile.

They were all three laughing, and the two young married women were pushing Gail forward. At the door Lucile and Arly separated from her, to peer out of the two side windows.

“He doesn’t look so old,” speculated Arly; and Lucile opened the door.

“Good-bye, dearie,” and Lucile kissed her cousin in plain sight of the curb, upon which there was nothing for that young lady to do but go.

For an instant, Edward E. Allison had a glimpse of her, in her garnet and turquoise, flanked by a sprightly vision in blue and another sprightly vision in pink, and he thought he heard the suppressed sounds of tittering; then the door closed, and the lace curtains of the hall windows bulged outward, and Gail came tripping down the steps.

“Two minutes and forty-eight seconds,” called Allison, putting away his stop watch with one hand and helping her with the other. He tucked her in more quickly than at the church, but with equal care, then he jumped in beside her, and never had he cut so swift and sure a circle with his sixty horse-power runabout.

They raced up and into the Park, and around the winding driveways with the light-hearted exhilaration of children, and if there was in them at that moment any trace of mature thought, they were neither one aware of it. They were glad that they were just living, and moving swiftly in the open air, glad that it was snowing, glad that the light was beginning to fade, that there were other vehicles in the Park, that the world was such a bright and happy place; and they were quite pleased, too, to be together.

It was still light, though the electric lamps were beginning to flare up through the thin snow veil, when they rounded a rocky drive, and came in view of a little lookout house perched on a hill.

“Oh!” called Gail, involuntarily putting her hand on his arm. “I want to go up there!”

The work of Edward E. Allison was well nigh perfection. He stopped the runabout exactly at the centre of the pathway, and was out and on Gail’s side of the car with the agility of a youngster after a robin’s egg. He helped her to alight, and would have helped her up the hill with great pleasure, but she was too nimble and too eager for that, and was in the lookout house several steps ahead of him.

“It’s glorious,” she said, and her low, melodious voice thrilled him again with that strange quality he had noticed when she had first spoken at the vestry meeting.

Below them lay a grey mist, dotted here and there with haloed lights, which receded in the distance into tiny yellow blurs, while the nearer lamps were swathed in swirling snowflakes. Nearby were ghosts of trees projecting their tops from the misty lake, and out of what seemed a vast eerie depth came the clang of street cars, and the rumble of the distant elevated, and the honks of auto horns, and all the rattle and roar of the great city, muffled and subdued.

“It’s like being out of the world.” He was astonished to find in himself the sudden growth of a poetic spirit, and his voice had in it the modulation which went with the sentiment.

“This was created,” mused Gail, as if answering an inner question. “Why should the clumsy minds of men destroy the simplicity of anything so vast, and good, and beautiful, as our instinctive belief in the Creator?”

Finding no answer in his experience to this unfathomable mystery, Edward E. Allison very wisely kept still and admired the scenery, which consisted of one girl framed tastefully in a miscellaneous assortment of snowflakes. When he tried to unravel the girl, he found her a still more fathomless mystery, and gave up the task in a hurry. After all, she was right there, and that was enough.

When she was quite finished with the view, she turned and went down the hill, and Edward Allison nearly sprained his spinal column in getting just ahead of her on the steepened narrow path. It was treacherous walking just there, with the freshly fallen snow on the shale stones. He was heartily glad that he had taken this precaution, for, near the bottom of the hill, one of her tiny French heels slid, and she might have fallen had it not been for the iron-like arm which he threw back to support her. For just an instant she was thrown fairly in his embrace, with his arm about her waist, and her weight upon his breast; and, in that instant, the fire which had been smouldering in him all afternoon burst into flame. With a mighty repression he resisted the impulse to crush her to him, and handed her to the equilibrium which she instinctively sought, though the arm trembled which had been pressed about her. His heart sang, as he helped her into the machine, and sprang in beside her. He felt a savage joy in his strength as he started the car and felt the wheel under his hard grip. He was young, younger than he had ever been in his boyhood; strong, stronger than he had ever been in his youth. What worlds he might conquer now with this new blood racing through his veins. It was as if he had been suddenly thrust into the fires of eternal life, and endowed with all the vast, irresistible force of creation!

Gail, too, was disturbed. While she had laughed to cover the embarrassment of her mishap, she had been quite collected enough to thank Allison for his ready aid; but she had felt the thrill of that tensed arm, and it had awakened in her mind an entirely new vein of puzzled conjecture. They were both silent, and busy with that new world which opens up when any two congenial personalities meet, as they raced out of the Park, and over One Hundred and Tenth Street, and up Riverside Drive, and out Old Broadway. Occasionally they exchanged bits of spineless repartee, and laughed at it, but this was only perfunctory, for they had left the boy and girl back yonder in the park.

Gravity with a man invariably leads him back to the consideration of his leading joy in life, business; and the first thing Allison knew he was indulging in quite a unique weakness, for him; he was bragging! Not exactly flat-footed; but, with tolerably strong insinuation, he gave her to understand that the consolidation of the immense traction interests of New York was about as tremendous an undertaking as she could comprehend, and that, having attained so dizzy a summit, he felt entitled to turn himself to lighter things, to enjoy life and gaiety and frivolity, to rest, as it were, upon his laurels.

Gail was amused, as she always was when men of strong achievement dropped into this weakness to interest girls. She did appreciate and admire his no doubt tremendous accomplishment; it was only his naïvete which amused her, and to save her she could not resist the wicked little impulse to nettle him. To his suggestion that he could now lead a merry life because he was entitled to rest upon his laurels, she had merely answered “Why?”

He dropped into a silence so dense that the thump was almost audible, and she was contrite. She had pricked him deeper than she knew, however. She had not understood how gigantic the man’s ambitions had been, nor how vain he was of his really marvellous progress. After all, why should he pause, when he had such power in him? She did well to speak slightingly of any achievement made by a man of such proved ability. New ambitions sprang up in him. The next time he talked of business with her he would have something startling under way; something to compel her respect. The muscles of his jaws knotted. It was like being dared to climb higher in a swaying tree.

“Oh, it’s dark!” suddenly discovered Gail. “Aunty will be frantic.”

“That’s so,” regretfully agreed Allison, who, having no Aunties of his own, was prone to forget them. “We’ll stop up at this roadhouse, and you can telephone her,” and he turned in at the drive where rose petalled lights gleamed out from the latticed windows of a low-eaved building. Dozens of autos, parked amid the snow-sheeted shrubbery, glared at them with big yellow eyes, and, through the windows, were white cloths and sparkling glassware, and laughing groups about the tables, and hurrying waiters. There was music, too, slow, languorous music!

“Doesn’t it look inviting!” exclaimed Allison, becoming instantly aware of the pangs of hunger.

“It’s an enchanting place!” agreed Gail enthusiastically.

Allison hesitated a moment.

“Tell your aunt we’re dining here,” he suggested.

She laughed aloud.

“Wouldn’t it be fun,” she speculated, and Allison led her in to the phone. She turned to him with a snap in her eyes at the door of the booth. “It depends on who answers.”

CHAPTER III
THE CHANGE IN THE RECTOR’S EYES

The grand privilege of Mrs. Jim Sargent’s happy life was to worry all she liked. She began with the rise of the sun, and worried about the silver chest; whether it had been locked over night. Usually she slipped downstairs, in the grey of the morning, to see, and, thus happily started on the day, she worried about breakfast and luncheon and dinner; and Jim and her sister and her niece, Lucile; and the servants and the horses and the flowers; and at nights she lay awake and heard burglars. Just now, as she sat on the seven chairs and the four benches of the mahogany panelled library, amid a wealth of serious-minded sculpture and painting and rare old prints, she was bathed in a new ecstasy of painful enjoyment. She was worried about Gail! It was six-thirty now, and Gail had not yet returned from Lucile’s.

At irregular intervals, say first two minutes and then three and a half, and then one, she walked into the Louis XIV reception parlour, and made up her mind to have a new jeweller try his hand at the sun-ray clock, and looked out of the windows to see if Lucile’s car was arriving. Between times she pursued her favourite literary diversion; reading the automobile accidents in the evening papers. She had spent all her later years in looking for Jim’s name among the list of the maimed!

Mrs. Helen Davies, dressed for dinner with as much care as if she had been about to attend one of the unattainable Mrs. Waverly-Gaites’ annuals, came sweeping down the marble stairs with the calm aplomb of one whom nothing can disturb, and, lorgnette in hand, turned into the library without even a glance into the floor-length mirror in the hall. Her amber beaded gown was set perfectly on her fine shoulders, and her black hair, fashionably streaked with grey, was properly done, as she was perfectly aware.

“I’m so glad you came down, Helen!” breathed Mrs. Sargent, with a sigh of relief. “I’m so worried!”

“Naturally, Grace,” returned her sister Helen, who was reputed to be gifted in repartee. “One would be, under the circumstances. What are they?” and she tapped her chin delicately with the tip of her lorgnette, as a warning to an insipient yawn. It was no longer good form to be bored.

“Gail!” replied Mrs. Sargent, who was inclined to dumpiness and a decided contrast to her stately widowed sister. “She hasn’t come home from Lucile’s!”

Mrs. Helen Davies sat beneath the statue of Minerva presenting wisdom to the world, and arranged the folds of her gown to the most graceful advantage.

“You shouldn’t expect her on time, coming from Lucile’s,” she observed, with a smile of proper pride. She was immensely fond of her daughter Lucile; but she preferred to live with her sister. “I have a brilliant idea, Grace. I’ll telephone,” and without seeming to exert herself in the least, she glided from her picturesque high-backed flemish chair, and sat at the library table, and drew the phone to her, and secured her daughter’s number.

“Hello, Lucile,” she called, in the most friendly of tones. “You’d better send Gail home, before your Aunt Grace develops wrinkles.”

“Gail isn’t here,” reported Lucile triumphantly. “She dropped in, two hours ago, and dropped right out, without waiting for her tea. You’d never guess with whom she’s driving! Edward E. Allison! He’s the richest bachelor in New York!”

Mrs. Helen Davies turned to her anxious sister with a sparkle in her black eyes.

“It’s all right, Grace,” and then she turned eagerly to the phone. “Did he come in?”

“They were in too big a rush,” jabbered Lucile excitedly. “He doesn’t look old at all. Arly and I watched them drive away. They seemed to be great chums. Gail got him at Uncle Jim’s vestry. Doesn’t she look stunning in red!”

“Where is she?” interrupted Mrs. Sargent, holding her thumb.

“Out driving,” reported sister Helen. “Have you sent your invitations for the house-party, Lucile?” and she discussed that important subject until Mrs. Sargent’s thumb ached.

“With whom is Gail driving, and where?” asked sister Grace, anxious for detail.

Mrs. Helen Davies touched all of her fingertips together in front of her on the library table, and beamed on Grace.

“Don’t worry about Gail,” she smilingly advised. “She is driving with Edward E. Allison. He is the richest bachelor in New York, though not socially prominent. No one has ever been able to interest him. I predict for Gail a brilliant future,” and she moved over contentedly to her favourite contrast with Minerva.

“Gail would attract any one,” returned Mrs. Sargent complacently, and then a little crease came in her brow. “I wonder where she met him.”

“At the vestry meeting, Lucile said.”

“Oh,” and Mrs. Sargent’s brow cleared instantly. “Jim introduced them. I wonder where Jim is!”

“I am glad Gail is not definitely engaged,” mused Mrs. Davies. “I am pleased with her. Young Mr. Clemmens may seem to be a very brilliant match, back home, but, with her exceptional advantages, she has every right to expect to do better.”

Again the creases came in Mrs. Sargent’s brow.

“I don’t know,” she worried. “Gail has had four letters in four days from Mr. Clemmens. Of course, if she genuinely cares for him—”

“But she doesn’t,” Helen comforted herself, figuring it all out carefully. “A young man who would write a letter a day, would exert every possible pressure to secure a promise, before he would let a beautiful creature like Gail come to New York for the winter; and the fact that he did not succeed proves, conclusively, that she has not made up her mind about him.”

The door opened, and Jim Sargent came in, wiping the snow from his stubby moustache before he distributed his customary hearty greetings to the family.

“Where’s Gail?” he wanted to know.

“Out driving with Edward E. Allison,” answered both ladies.

“Still?” inquired Jim Sargent, and then he laughed. “She’s a clever girl. Smart as a whip! She nearly started a riot in the vestry.”

“Was Willis Cunningham there?” inquired Mrs. Davies interestedly.

“Took me in a corner after the meeting and told me that Gail bore a remarkable resemblance to the Fratelli Madonna, and might he call.”

“Mr. Cunningham is one of the men I was anxious for her to meet,” and Mrs. Davies touched her second finger, as if she were checking off a list.

“What did Gail do?” wondered Mrs. Sargent.

Jim, crossing to the door, chuckled, and removed his watch chain from his vest.

“Told Boyd that Market Square Church was a good business proposition.”

The ladies did not share his amusement.

“To the Reverend Boyd!” breathed Mrs. Sargent, shocked. She considered the Reverend Smith Boyd the most wonderful young man of his age.

“How undiplomatic,” worried Mrs. Davies. “I must have a little talk with her about cleverness. It’s dangerous in a girl.”

“Not these days,” declared Jim Sargent, who stood ready to defend Gail, right or wrong, at every angle. “Allison and Manning enjoyed it immensely.”

“Oh,” remarked Helen Davies, somewhat mollified. “And Mr. Cunningham?”

“And what did the Reverend Boyd say?” inquired Mrs. Sargent, much concerned.

“I don’t think he liked it very well,” speculated Gail’s Uncle Jim. “He’s coming over to-night to discuss church matters. I’ll have to dress in a hurry,” and he looked at the watch which he held, with its chain, in his hand.

The telephone bell rang, and Sargent, who could not train himself to wait for a servant to sift the messages, answered it immediately, with his characteristic explosive-first-syllabled:

“Hello!”

“Oh, it’s you, Uncle Jim,” called a buoyant voice. “Mr. Allison and I have found the most enchanting roadhouse in the world, and we’re going to take dinner here. It’s all right, isn’t it?”

“Certainly,” he replied, equally buoyant. “Enjoy yourself, Chubsy,” and he hung up the receiver.

“What is it?” asked Mrs. Davies, in a tone distinctly chill. She had a premonition that Jim Sargent had done something foolish. He seemed so pleased.

“Gail won’t be home,” he announced carelessly, starting for the stairs. “She’s dining with Allison at some roadhouse.”

“Unchaperoned!” gasped Mrs. Davies.

“She’s all right, Helen,” remarked Jim, starting upstairs. “Allison’s a fine fellow.”

“But what will he think of Gail!” protested Helen. “That sort of unconventionality has gone clear out. Jim, you’ll have to get back that number!”

“Sorry,” regretted Jim. “Can’t do it. Against the telephone rules,” and he went on upstairs, positively humming!

The two ladies looked at each other, and sat down in the valley of the shadows of gloom. There was nothing to be done! Mrs. Davies, however, was different from her sister. Grace Sargent was an accomplished worrier, who could remain numb in the exercise of her art, but Helen Davies was a woman of action. She presently called her daughter.

“Have you started your dinner, Lucile?” she demanded.

“No, Ted just came home,” reported Lucile. “What’s the matter?”

“Don’t let him take time to dress,” urged her mother. “You must go right out and chaperon Gail.”

“Where is she?” Lucile delayed to inquire.

“At some roadhouse, dining with Mr. Allison!”

“Well, what do you think of Gail!” exulted Lucile. “Oh, Arly!” and Mrs. Davies heard the receiver drop to the end of its line. She heard laughter, and then the voice of Lucile again. “Mother, she’s with Edward E. Allison, and they’ll do better without a chaperon. Besides, mother dear, there’s a million roadhouses. We’ll come down after dinner. I want to see her when she returns.”

“I don’t suppose she could be found, except by accident,” granted her mother, and gave up the enterprise. “Times are constantly changing,” she complained to her sister. “The management of a girl becomes more difficult every year. So much freedom makes them disregardful of the aid of their elders in making a selection.”

It was not until nine o’clock that the ladies expressed their worry again. At that hour, Ted and Lucile Teasdale and Arly Fosland came in with the exuberance of a New Year’s Eve celebration.

“It’s great sleighing to-night,” stated Lucile’s husband, who was a thin-waisted young man, with a splendid natural gift for dancing.

“All that’s missing is the bells,” chattered the black-haired Arly, breaking straight for her favourite big couch in the library. “The only way to have any speed in an auto is to go sidewise.”

“We’re to get up a skidding match, so I can bet on our chauffeur,” laughed Lucile, fluffing her blonde ringlets before the big mirror in the hall. “We slid a complete circle coming down through the Park, and never lost a revolution!”

“I’ve been thinking it must be bad driving,” fretted Mrs. Sargent. “Gail should be home by now!”

“Allison’s a safe driver,” comforted Ted, who liked to see everybody happy.

Jim Sargent came to the door of the study, in which he was closeted with the Reverend Smith Boyd. Jim was practically the young rector’s business guardian.

“Hello, folks,” he nodded. “Gail home?”

“Not yet,” responded Mrs. Sargent, in whose brow the creases were becoming fixed.

“It’s hardly time,” estimated Jim, and went back in the study.

“Ted has a new divinity,” boasted the wife of that agreeable young man.

“Had, you mean,” corrected Ted. “She’s deserted me for a single man.”

“Is it the Piccadilly widow?” inquired Arly, punching another pillow under her elbow.

“Certainly,” corroborated Ted. “You don’t suppose I have a new one every day.”

“You’re losing your power of fascination then,” retorted Arly. “Lucile’s still in the running with two a day.”

“She should have her kind by the dozen,” responded Ted, complacently stroking his glossy moustache.

“The young set takes up some peculiar fads,” mused Mrs. Davies, with a trace of concern. “I can’t quite accustom myself to the sanction of flirting.”

“Neither can I,” agreed Ted. “It takes the fun out of it.”

“The only joy is in boasting about it at home,” complained Arly Fosland. “I can’t even get Gerald interested in my affairs, so I’ve dropped them.”

“Gerald wouldn’t understand a flirtation of his own,” criticised Ted. “I never saw a man who made such hard work of belonging to twelve clubs. Arly, how did you manage to make him see your fatal lure?”

“Mother did it,” returned Arly, drowsily absorbing the grateful warmth of the room.

“I don’t think anything is half so dangerous to a bachelor as a mother,” stated Lucile, with a friendly smile at Mrs. Davies.

“I’m going to start a new fad,” announced Arly, sitting up and considering the matter; “prudery. There’s nothing more effective.”

“It’s too wicked,” objected Lucile’s mother, and scored another point for herself. It was a wearing task to keep up a reputation for repartee.

“I’m terribly vexed,” confided Lucile, stopping behind Ted’s chair, and idly tickling the back of his neck. “I thought it would be such a brilliant scheme to give a winter week-end party, but Mrs. Acton is going to give one at her country place.”

“Before or after?” demanded Mrs. Davies, with whom this was a point of the utmost importance.

“A week after,” answered Lucile, “but her invitations are out. I wish I hadn’t mailed mine. What can we do to make ours notable?”

That being a matter worth considering, the entire party, with the exception of Aunt Grace, who was listening for the doorbell, set their wits and their tongues to work. Mrs. Helen Davies took a keener interest in it than any of them. The invitation list was the most important of all, for it was a long and arduous way to the heaven of the socially elect, and it took generations to accomplish the journey. The Murdock girls, Grace and herself, had no great-grandfather. Murdock Senior had made his money after Murdock Junior was married, but in time to give the girls a thorough polishing in an exclusive academy. Thus launched, Helen had married a man with a great-great-grandfather, but Grace had married Jim Sargent. Jim was a dear, and had plenty of money, and was as good a railroader as Grace’s father, with whom he had been great chums; but still he was Jim Sargent. Gail’s mother, who had married Jim’s brother, had seven ancestors, but a mother’s family name is so often overlooked. Nevertheless, when Gail came to marry, the maternal ancestry, all other things being favourable, might even secure her an invitation to Mrs. Waverly-Gaites’ annual! Reaching this point in her circle of speculation, Mrs. Helen Davies came back to her starting place, and looked at the library clock with a shock. Ten; and the girl was not yet home!

The Reverend Smith Boyd came out of the study with his most active vestryman, and joined the circle of waiting ones. He was a pleasant addition to the party, for, in spite of belonging to the clergy, he was able to conduct himself, in Rome, in a quite acceptable Roman fashion. Pleasant as he was, they wished he would go home, because it was not convenient to worry in his company; and by this time Lucile herself was beginning to watch the clock with some anxiety. Only Mrs. Sargent felt no restraint. An automobile honked at the door as if it were stopping, and she half arose; then the same honk sounded half way down the block, and she sat down again.

“I’m so worried about Gail!” she stated, holding her thumb.

“We all are,” supplemented Mrs. Davies quickly. “She has been dining with a party of friends, and the streets are so slippery.”

“I should judge Mr. Allison to be a very capable driver,” said the Reverend Smith Boyd; and the ladies glared at Jim. “I envy them their drive on a night like this. I wonder if there will be good coasting.”

“Fine,” judged Jim Sargent, looking out of the window toward the adjoining rectory. “That first snow was wet and it froze. Now there’s a good inch on top of it, and, at this rate, there should be three by morning. A little thaw, and another freeze, and a little more snow to-morrow, and I’ll be tempted to make a bob-sled.”

“I’ll help you,” offered the Reverend Smith Boyd, with a glow of pleasure in his particularly fine eyes. “I used to have a twelve seated bob-sled, which never started down the hill with less than fifteen.”

“I never rode on one,” complained Arly. “I think I’m due for a bob-sled party.”

“You’re invited,” Lucile promptly told her. “Uncle Jim, you and Dr. Boyd will have to hunt up your hammer and saw.”

“I’ll start right to work,” offered the young rector, with the alacrity which had made him a favourite.

“If the snow holds, we’ll go over into the Jersey hills, and slide,” promised Sargent with enthusiasm. “I’ll give the party.”

“I seem to anticipate a pleasant evening,” considered Ted Teasdale, whose athletics were confined entirely to dancing. “We’ll ride down hill on the sleds, and up hill in the machines.”

“That’s barred,” immediately protested Jim. “The boys have to pull the girls up hill. Isn’t that right, Boyd?”

“It was correct form when I was a boy,” returned the rector, with a laugh. He held his muscular hands out before him as if he could still feel the cut of the rope in his palms. He squared his big shoulders, and breathed deeply, in memory of those health-giving days. There was a flush in his cheeks, and his eyes, which were sometimes green, glowed with a decided blue. Arlene Fosland, looking lazily across at him, from the comfortable nest which she had not quitted all evening, decided that it was a shame that he had been cramped into the ministry.

“There’s Gail!” cried Mrs. Sargent, jumping to her feet and running into the hall, before the butler could come in answer to the bell. She opened the door, and was immediately kissed, then Gail came back into the library without stopping to remove her furs. She was followed by Allison, and she carried something inside her coat. Her cheeks were rosy, from the crisp air, and the snow sparkled on her brown hair like tiny diamonds.

“We’ve been buying a dog!” she breathlessly explained, and, opening her coat, she produced an animated teddy bear, with two black eyes and one black pointed nose protruding from a puff ball of pure white. She set it on the floor, where it waddled uncertainly in three directions, and finally curled between the Reverend Smith Boyd’s feet.

“A collie!” and the Reverend Smith Boyd picked up the warm infant for an admiring inspection. “It’s a beautiful puppy.”

“Isn’t it a dear!” exclaimed Gail, taking it away from him, and favouring him with a smile. She whisked the fluffy little ball over to her Aunt Grace, and left it in that lady’s lap, while she threw off her furs.

“Where could you buy a dog at this hour?” inquired Mrs. Davies, glancing at the clock, which stood now at the accusing hour of a quarter of eleven.

“We woke up the kennel man,” laughed Gail, turning, with a sparkling glance, to Allison, who was being introduced ceremoniously to the ladies by Uncle Jim. “We had a perfectly glorious evening! We dined at Roseleaf Inn, entirely surrounded by hectic lights, then we drove five miles into the country and bought Flakes. We came home so fast that Mr. Allison almost had to hold me in.” She turned, laughing, to find the eyes of the Reverend Smith Boyd fixed on her in cold disapproval. They were no longer blue!

CHAPTER IV
TOO MANY MEN

“A conscience must be a nuisance to a rector,” sympathised Gail Sargent, as she walked up the hill beside the Reverend Smith Boyd.

The tall, young rector shifted the thin rope of the sled to his other hand.

“Epigrams are usually more clever than true,” he finally responded, with a twinkle in his eyes. It had been in his mind to sharply defend that charge, but he reflected that it was unwise to assume the speech worth serious consideration. Moreover, he had come to this toboggan party for healthful physical exercise!

“Then you’re guilty of an epigram,” retorted Gail, who was annoyed with the Reverend Smith Boyd without quite knowing why. “You can’t believe all you are compelled, as a minister, to say.”

“That,” returned the Reverend Smith Boyd coldly, “is a matter of interpretation.” He commended himself for his patience, as he proceeded to instruct this mistaken young person. She was a lovable girl, in spite of the many things he found in her of which to disapprove. “The eye of the needle through which the camel was supposed not to be able to pass, was, in reality, a narrow city gate called the Needle’s Eye.”

Gail looked at him with that little smile at the corners of her red lips, eyelids down, curved lashes on her cheeks, and beneath the lashes a sparkle brighter than the moonlight on the snow crystals in the adjoining field.

“It seems to me there was something about wealth in that metaphor,” she observed, her round eyes flashing open as she smiled up at him. “If it was so difficult even in those days for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, how can a rich church hope to enter the spirit of the gospel?”

The Reverend Smith Boyd hastily, and almost roughly, drew her aside, as a long, low bob-sled, accompanied by appropriate screams, came streaking down the hill, and passed them. They both turned and followed its progress down the narrowing white road, to where it curved away in a silver line far at the bottom of a hill. Hills and valleys, and fences and trees, and even a distant stream were covered with the fleecy mantle of winter, while high over head in a sky of blue, hung a round, white moon, which flooded the country-side with mellow light, and strewed upon earth’s fresh robe a wealth of countless sparkling gems.

“This is a wonderful sermon,” mused Gail; then she turned to the rector. She softened toward him, as she saw that he, too, had partaken of the awe and majesty of this scene. He stood straight and tall, his splendidly poised head thrown back, and his gaze resting far off where the hills cut against the sky in tree-clad scallops.

“It is an inspiration,” he told her, with a tone in his vibrant voice which she had not heard before; and for that brief instant these two, between whom there had seemed some instinctive antagonism, were nearer in sympathy than either had thought it possible to be. Then the Reverend Smith Boyd happened to remember something. “The morality or immorality of riches depends upon its use,” he sonorously stated, as he stepped out into the road again, dragging his sled behind him, following the noisy, loitering crowd with the number two bob-sled. “Market Square Church, which is the one I suppose you meant in your comparison with the rich man, intends to devote all the means with which a kind Providence has blessed it, to the glory of God.”

“And the gratification of the billionaire vestry,” she added, still annoyed with the Reverend Smith Boyd, though she did not know why.

He turned to her almost savagely.

“Have you no sense of reverence?” he demanded.

“For the church, or the creed, or the ministry? Not a particle!” she heartily assured him. “The church, as an instrument for good, has practically ceased to exist. Even charity, the greatest of the three principles upon which the church was originally founded, has been taken away from it, because the secular organisations dispense charity better and more sanely, and while the object is still alive.”

Again the Reverend Smith Boyd drew her out of the road, almost ungently, and unnecessarily in advance of need, to permit a thick man to glide leisurely by, on his stomach on a hand sled. He grinned up at them from under a stubby moustache, and waved a hand at them with a vigour which nearly ran him into a ditch; but a sharp scrape of his toe in the snow, made with a stab the expertness of which had come back to him through forty years, brought him into the path again, and he slid majestically onward, with happy forgetfulness of the dignity belonging to the president of the Towando Valley Railroad and a vestryman of Market Square Church.

“That used to be lots of fun,” remembered Gail, looking after her Uncle Jim in envy.

“Market Square Church has dispensed millions in charity,” the rector felt it his duty to inform her, as they started up the hill again.

“If it’s like our church at home it costs ninety cents to deliver a dime,” she retorted, bristling anew with bygone aggravations. “So long as you can deliver baskets of provisions in person, it is all right, but the minute you let the money out of your sight it filters through too many paid hands. I found this out just before I resigned from our charity committee.”

He looked at her in perplexity. She was so young and so pretty, so charming in the ermine which framed her pink face, so gentle of speech and movement, that her visible self and her incisive mind seemed to be two different creatures.

“Why are you so bitter against the church?” and his tone was troubled, not so much about what she had said, but about her.

“I didn’t know I was,” she confessed, concerned about it herself. “All at once I seem to look on it as an old shoe which should be cast aside. It is so elaborate to do so little good in the world. Morality is on the increase, as any page of history will show.”

“I believe that to be true,” he hastily assured her, glad to be able to agree with her upon something.

“But it is in spite of the church, not because of it,” she immediately added. “You can’t say that there is a tremendous moral influence in a congregation which numbers eight hundred, and sends less than fifty to services. The balance show their devotion to Christianity by a quarterly check.”

The Reverend Smith Boyd felt unfairly hit.

“That is the sorrow of the church,” he sadly confessed; “the lukewarmness of its followers.”

She felt a trace of compunction for him; but why had he gone into the ministry?

“Can you blame them?” she demanded, as much aggrieved as if she had suffered a personal distress. “Not so long ago, the governing body of the church held a convention in which the uppermost thought was this same lukewarmness. It was felt, and acknowledged, that the church was losing its personal hold on its membership, and that something should be done about it; yet that same body progressed no further in this problem than to realise that something should be done about it; and spent hours and hours wrangling over whether banana wine could be used for the sacrament in Uganda, where grapes do not grow, and where every bottle of grape wine carried over the desert represents the life of a man. Of what value is that to religion? How do you suppose Christ would have decided that question?”

The rector flushed as if he had been struck, and he turned to Gail with that cold look in his green eyes.

“That is too deep a subject to discuss here, but if you will permit me, I will take it up with you at the house,” he quietly returned, and there was a dogged compulsion in his tone.

“I shall be highly interested in the defence,” accepted Gail, with an aggravating smile.

There seemed to be but very little to say after that, and they walked silently up the hill together towards the yellow camp fire, fuming inwardly at each other. Near the top of the hill, her ermine scarf came loose at the throat, and, with her numbed hands, she could not locate the little clasp with which it had been held.

“May I help you?” offered the rector, constraining himself to politeness.

“Thank you.” She was extremely sweet about it, and he reached up to perform the courtesy. The rounded column of her neck was white as marble in the moonlight, and, as he sought the clasps, his fingers, drawn from his woollen gloves, touched her warm throat, and they tingled. He started as if he had received an electric shock, and, as he looked into her eyes, a purple mist seemed to spring between them. He mechanically fastened the clasps, though his fingers trembled. “Thank you,” again said Gail, and he did not notice that her voice was unusually low. She went on over to the group gathered around the fire, but the Reverend Smith Boyd stood where she had left him, staring stupidly at the ground. He was in a whirl of bewilderment, amid which there was some unreasoning resentment, but beneath it all there was an inexplicable sadness.

“Just in time for the Palisade Special, Gail,” called Lucile Teasdale.

“I don’t know,” laughed Gail. “I think of going on a private car this trip,” and she sought among the group for distraction from certain oppressive thought. Allison, and Lucile and Ted and Arly, were among the more familiar figures; besides were a cherub-cheeked young lady in a bear skin, to whom Ted Teasdale was pretending to pay assiduous attention; and the thoughtful Willis Cunningham; and Houston Van Ploon, who was a ruddy-faced young fellow with an English moustache, and a perpetual air of having just come from his tailor’s; and a startling Adonis, with pink cheeks and a shining black goatee and a curly moustache, and large, round, black eyes, which were deep, and full of almost anything one might wish to put into them. This astoundingly fascinating gentleman had been proudly introduced as Dick Rodley, by Arlene, early in the evening, with an air which plainly stated that he was a personal discovery for which she gave herself great credit. At present, however, he was warming the slender white hands of Lucile Teasdale. Now he sprang up and came towards Gail.

“The Palisade Special will not start without Miss Sargent,” he declared, bending upon her an ardent gaze, and bestowing upon her a smile which displayed a flash of perfect white teeth.

Gail breathlessly thought him the most dangerously handsome thing she had ever seen, but she missed the foreign accent in him. That would have made him complete.

“I’m sorry that the Palisade Special will be delayed,” she coolly told him, but she tempered the deliberateness of that decision with an upward and sidelong glance, which she was startled to recognise in herself as distinct coquetry. She concluded, however, on reflection, that this was only a just meed which no one could withhold from this resplendent creature.

“You haven’t the heart to refuse,” protested handsome Dick, coming nearer, and again smiling down at her.

“I have a prior claim,” laughed Allison, stepping up and taking her by the arm. “It’s my turn to guide Miss Sargent on the two-passenger sled.”

There was something new about Allison to-night. There was the thrill and the exultation of youth in his voice, and twenty years seemed to have been dropped from his age. There was an intensity about him, too, and also a proprietor-like compulsion, which decided Gail on a certain diversion she had entertained. She was oppressed with men to-night. The world was full of them, and they had closed too nearly around her.

Suddenly she broke away with a laugh, and, taking the two-passenger sled from Smith Boyd, who still stood in preoccupation at the edge of the group, she picked it up and ran with it, and threw herself face forward on it, as she had done when she was a kiddy, and shot down the hill, to the intense disapproval of the Reverend Boyd! Dick Rodley, ever alert in his chosen profession, grabbed a light steel racer from the edge of the bank, and, with a magnificent run, slapped himself on the sled, and darted in pursuit! The rector’s lip curled the barest trace at one corner, but Edward E. Allison, looking down the hill, grinned, and lit a cigar.

“Ted Teasdale, come right over here,” ordered Lucile.

“Can’t,” carelessly returned Ted. “I’m having a serious flirtation with Miss Kenneth.”

“You have to stop, and flirt with me,” Lucile insisted, and going over, she slipped a hand within his sleeve, and passed the other arm affectionately around Marion Kenneth. “Gail stole the ornament.”

“Serves you right,” charged Arly Fosland. “You stole him from me. Come on, Houston, bring out the Palisade Special.”

Houston Van Ploon, who was a brother to all ladies, obediently dragged forward the number two bob-sled, and set its nose at the brow of the hill, and the merry mob piled on.

“Coming Allison?” called Cunningham. “There’s room for you both, Doctor.”

“I don’t think I’ll ride this trip, thanks,” returned Allison, and, as the rector also declined with pleasant thanks, Allison gave the voyagers a hearty push, and walked back to the camp fire.

“I received the ultimatum of your vestry to-day, Doctor Boyd,” observed Allison when they were alone. “Still that eventual fifty million.”

“Well, yes,” returned the rector briskly, and he backed up comfortably to the blaze. He was a different man now. “We discussed your proposition thoroughly, and decided that, in ten years, the property is worth fifty million to you, for the purpose you have in mind. Consequently why take less.”

Allison surveyed him shrewdly for a moment.

“That’s the argument of a bandit,” he remarked. “Why accept all that the prisoner has when his friends can raise a little more?”

“I don’t see the use of metaphor,” retorted the rector, who dealt professionally in it. “Business is business.”

Allison grunted, and flicked his ashes into the fire.

“By George, you’re right,” he agreed. “I’ve been trying to handle you like a church, but now I’m going after you like the business organisation you are.”

The Reverend Smith Boyd reddened. The charge that Market Square Church was a remarkably lucrative enterprise was becoming too general for comfort.

“The vestry has given you their decision,” he returned, standing stiff and straight, with his hands clasped behind him. “You may pay for the Vedder Court tenement property a cash sum which, in ten years, will accrue to fifty million dollars, or you may let it alone,” and his tone was as forcefully crisp as Allison’s, though he could not hide the musical timbre of it.

“I won’t pay that price, and I won’t let the property alone,” Allison snapped back. “The city needs it.”

For a moment the two men looked each other levelly in the eyes. There seemed to have sprang up some new enmity between them. A thick man with a stubby moustache came puffing up to the fire, and sat down on his sled with a thump.

“Splendid exercise,” he gasped, holding his sides. “I think about a week of it would either reduce me to a living skeleton, or kill me.”

“Your vestry’s an ass,” Allison took pleasure in informing him.

“Same to you and many of them,” puffed Jim Sargent. “What’s the trouble with you? Trying to take a business advantage of a church.”

“I’d have a better chance with a Jew,” was Allison’s contemptuous reply.

“Oh, see here, Allison!” remonstrated Jim Sargent seriously. He even rose to his feet to make it more emphatic. “You mustn’t treat Market Square Church with so much indignity.”

“Why not? Market Square Church puts itself in a position to be considered in the light of any other grasping organisation.”

The Reverend Smith Boyd, finding in himself the growth of a most uncloth-like anger, decided to walk away rather than suffer the aggravation which must ensue in this conversation. Consequently, he started down the hill, dragging Jim Sargent’s sled behind him for company. There were no further insults to the church, however.

“Jim, what are the relations of the Towando Valley to the L. and C.?” asked Allison, offering Sargent a cigar.

“Largely paternal,” and the president of the Towando Valley grinned. “We feed it when it’s good, and spank it when it cries.”

“Hold control of the stock?”

“No, only its transportation,” returned Sargent complacently.

“Stock is a good deal scattered, I suppose.”

“Small holdings entirely, and none of the holders proud,” replied Sargent. “It starts no place and comes right back, and the share-holders won’t pay postage to send in their annual proxies.”

“Then the stock doesn’t seem to be worth buying,” observed Allison, with vast apparent indifference.

“Only to piece out a collection,” chuckled Sargent. “I didn’t know you were interested in railroads.”

“I wasn’t a week ago,” and Allison looked out across the starry sky to the tree-scalloped hills. “With the completion of the consolidation of New York’s transportation system, and the building of a big central station, I thought I was through. It seemed a big achievement to gather all these lines to a common centre, like holding them in my hand; to converge four millions of people at one point, to handle them without confusion, and to re-distribute them along the same lines, looked like a life’s work; but now I’m beginning to become ambitious.”

“Oh, I see,” grinned Jim Sargent. “You want to do something you can really call a job. If I remember rightly, you started with an equipment of four horse cars and two miles of rusted rail. What do you want to conquer next?”

Allison glanced down the hill, then back out across the starlit sky. Some new fervor had possessed him to-night which made him a poet, and loosened the tongue which, previous to this, could almost calculate its utterances in percentage.

“The world,” he said.

CHAPTER V
EDWARD E. ALLISON TAKES A VACATION

Edward E. Allison walked into the offices of the Municipal Transportation Company at nine o’clock, and set his basket of opened and carefully annotated letters out of the mathematical centre of his desk; then he touched a button, and a thin young man, whose brow, at twenty, wore the traces of preternatural age, walked briskly in.

“Has Mr. Greggory arrived?”

The intensely earnest young man glanced at the clock.

“Yes, sir,” he replied.

“Take him these letters, and ask him if he will be kind enough to step here.”

“Yes, sir,” and the concentrated young man departed with the basket, feeling that he had quite capably borne his weight of responsibility.

Allison, looking particularly fresh and buoyant this morning, utilised his waiting time to the last fraction of a second. He put in a telephone call, and took from the drawer of his desk a packet of neatly docketed papers, an index memorandum book, a portfolio of sketches, and three cigars, the latter of which he put in his cigar case; then, his desk being empty, except for a clean memorandum pad and pencil, he closed it and locked it. The telephone girl reported his number on the wire, and, the number proving to be that of a florist, he ordered some violets sent to Gail Sargent.

Greggory walked in, a fat man with no trace of nonsense about him.

“Out for the day, Ed?” he surmised, gauging that probability by the gift of the letters.

“A month or so,” amended Allison, rising, and surveying the three articles on his desk calculatingly. “I’m going to take a vacation.”

“It’s about time,” agreed his efficient general manager. “I think it’s been four years since you stopped to take a breath. Going to play a little?”

“That’s the word,” and Allison chuckled like a boy. “Take care of these things,” and tossing him the packet of papers and the memorandum book, he took the portfolio of sketches under his arm.

“I suppose we’ll have your address,” suggested Greggory.

“No.”

Greggory pondered frowningly. He began to see a weight piling up on him, and, though he was capable, he loved his flesh.

“About that Shell Beach extension?” he inquired. “There’s likely to be trouble with the village of Waveview. Their local franchises—”

“Settle it yourself,” directed Allison carelessly, and Greggory stared. During the long and arduous course of Allison’s climb, he had built his success on personal attention to detail. “Good-bye,” and Allison walked out, lighting a cigar on his way to the door.

He stopped his runabout in front of a stationer’s, and bought the largest globe they had in stock.

“Address, please?” asked the clerk, pencil poised over delivery slip.

“I’ll take it with me,” and Allison helped them secure the clumsy thing in the seat beside him. Then he streaked up the Avenue to the small and severely furnished house where four ebony servants protected him from the world.

“Out of town except to this list,” he directed his kinky-haired old butler, and going into the heavy oak library, he closed the door. On the wall, depending from the roller case, was a huge map of the boroughs of New York, which had hung there since he had first begun to group transportation systems together. It was streaked and smudged with the marks of various coloured pencils, some faded and some fresh, and around one rectangle, lettered Vedder Court, was a heavy green mark. He picked up a pencil from the stand, but laid it down again with a smile. There was no need for that new red line; nor need, either, any longer, for the map itself; and he snapped it up into its case, on roller-springs stiff with disuse. In its place he drew down another one, a broad familiar domain between two oceans, and he smiled as his eye fell upon that tiny territory near the Atlantic, which, up to now, he had called a world, because he had mastered it.

His library phone rang.

“Mr. Allison?” a woman’s voice. Gail Sargent, Mrs. Sargent, Mrs. Davies, or Lucile Teasdale. No other ladies were on his list. The voice was not that of Gail. “Are you busy to-night?” Oh, yes, Lucile Teasdale.

“Free as air,” he gaily told her.

“I’m so glad,” rattled Lucile. “Ted’s just telephoned that he has tickets for ‘The Lady’s Maid.’ Can you join us?”

“With pleasure.” No hesitation whatever; prompt and agreeable; even pleased.

“That’s jolly. I think six makes such a nice crowd. Besides you and ourselves, there’ll be Arly and Dick Rodley and Gail.” Gail, of course. He had known that. “We’ll start from Uncle Jim’s at eight o’clock.”

Allison called old Ephraim.

“I want to begin dressing at seven-fifteen,” he directed. “At three o’clock set some sandwiches inside the door. Have some fruit in my dressing-room.”

He went back to his map, remembering Lucile with a retrospective smile. The last time he had seen that vivacious young person she had been emptying a box of almonds, at the side of the camp fire at the toboggan party. He jotted down a memorandum to send her some, and drew a high stool in front of the map.

Strange this new ambition which had come to him. Why, he had actually been about to consider his big work finished; and now, all at once, everything he had done seemed trivial. The eager desire of youth to achieve had come to him again, and the blood sang in his veins as he felt of his lusty strength. He was starting to build, with a youth’s enthusiasm but with a man’s experience, and with the momentum of success and the power of capital. Something had crystallised him in the past few days.

At 7:15 Ephraim found him at the end of the table in the midst of some neat and intricate tabulations

Across the fertile fields and the mighty mountains and the arid deserts of the United States, there angled four black threads, from coast to coast, and everywhere else were shorter main lines and shorter branches, and, last of all, mere fragments of railroads. He began with the long, angling threads, but he ended with the fragments, and these, in turns, he gave minute and careful study. At three o’clock he took a sandwich and ordered his car. He was gone less than an hour, and came back with an armload of books; government reports, volumes of statistics, and a file of more intimate information from the office of his broker. He threw off his coat when he came in this time, and spread, on the big, lion-clawed table at which Napoleon had once planned a campaign, a vari-coloured mass of railroad maps. At seven-fifteen old Ephraim found him at the end of the table in the midst of some neat and intricate tabulations.

“Time to dress, sir,” suggested Ephraim.

Allison pushed to the floor the railroad map upon which he had been working, and pulled another one towards him. Ephraim waited one minute.

“I’ve run your tub, sir.”

Allison leafed rapidly through the pages of an already hard-used book, to the section concerning the Indianapolis and St. Joe Railroad. Ephraim looked around calculatingly, and selected an old atlas from the top of the case near the door. He held it aloft an instant, and let it fall with a slam.

“Oh, it’s you,” remarked the absorbed Allison, glancing up.

“Yes, sir,” returned Ephraim. “You told me to come for you at seven-fifteen.”

Allison arose, and rubbed the tips of his fingers over his eyes.

“Keep this room locked,” he ordered, and stalked obediently upstairs. For the next thirty minutes he belonged to Ephraim.

He was as carefree as a boy when he reached Jim Sargent’s house, and his eyes snapped when he saw Gail come down the stairs, in a pearl tinted gown, with a triple string of pearls in her waving hair, and a rose-coloured cloak depending from her gracefully sloping shoulders.

Her own eyes brightened at the sight of him. He had been much in her mind to-day; not singly but as one of a group. She was quite conscious that she liked him, but she was more conscious that she was curious about him. She was curious about most men, she suddenly found, comparing them, sorting them, weighing them; and Allison was one of the most perplexing specimens. A little heavy in his evening clothes, but not awkward, and not without dignity of bearing. He stepped forward to shake hands with her, and, for a moment, she found in her an inclination to cling to the warm thrill of his clasp. She had never before been so aware of anything like that. Nevertheless, when she had withdrawn her hand, she felt a sense of relief.

“Hello, Allison,” called the hearty voice of Jim Sargent. “You’re looking like a youngster to-night.”

“I feel like one,” replied Allison, smiling. “I’m on a vacation.” He was either vain enough or curious enough to glance at himself in the big mirror as he passed it. He did look younger; astonishingly so; and he had about him a quality of lightness which made him restless. He had been noted among his business associates for a certain dry wit, scathing, satirical, relentless; now he used that quality agreeably, and when Lucile and Ted, and Arly and Dick Rodley joined them, he was quite easily a sharer in the gaiety. At the theatre he was the same. He participated in all the repartee during the intermissions, and the fact that he found Gail studying him, now and then, only gave him an added impulse. He was frank with himself about Gail. He wanted her, and he had made up his mind to have her. He was himself a little surprised at his own capacity of entertainment, and when he parted from Gail at the Sargent house, he left her smiling, and with a softer look in her eyes than he had yet seen there.

Immediately on his return to his library, Allison threw off his coat and waistcoat, collar and tie, and sat at the table.

“What is there in the ice box?” he wanted to know.

“Well, sir,” enumerated Ephraim carefully; “Mirandy had a chicken pot-pie for dinner, and then there’s—”

“That will do; cold,” interrupted Allison. “Bring it here with as few service things as possible, a bottle of Vichy and some olives.”

He began to set down some figures, and when Ephraim came, shaking his head to himself about such things as cold dumplings at night, Allison stopped for ten minutes, and lunched with apparent relish. At seven-thirty he called Ephraim and ordered a cold plunge and some breakfast. He had been up all night, and on the map of the United States there were pencilled two thin straight black lines; one from New York to Chicago, and one from Chicago to San Francisco. Crossing them, and paralleling them, and angling in their general direction, but quite close to them in the main, were lines of blue and lines of green and lines of orange; these three.

Another day and another night he spent with his maps, and his books, and his figures; then he went to his broker with a list of railroads.

“Get me what stock you can of these,” he directed. “Pick it up as quietly as possible.”

The broker looked them over and elevated his eyebrows, There was not a road in the list which was important strategically, but he had ceased to ask questions of Edward Allison.

Three days later, Allison went into the annual stockholders’ meeting of the L. and C. Railroad, and registered majority of the stock in that insignificant line, which ran up the shore opposite Crescent Island, joined the Towando Valley shortly after its emergence from its hired entrance into New York, ran for fifty miles over the roadway of the Towando, with which it had a long-time tracking contract, and wandered up into the country, where it served as an outlet to certain conservatively profitable territory.

The secretary of the L. and C., a man of thick spectacles and a hundred wrinkles, looked up with fear in his eyes as his cramped old fingers clutched his pen.

“I suppose you’ll be making some important changes, Mr. Allison,” he quavered.

“Not in the active officers,” returned Allison with a smile, and the president, who wore flowing side-whiskers, came over to shake hands with him. “How soon can you call the meeting?”

“Almost immediately,” replied the president. “I suppose there’ll be a change in policies.”

“Not at all,” Allison reassured him, and walked into the board room, where less than a dozen stockholders, as old and decrepit as the road itself, had congregated.

The president, following him, invited him to a seat next his own chair, and laid before him a little slip of paper.

“This is the official slate which had been prepared,” he explained, with a smile which it took some bravery to produce.

“It’s perfectly satisfactory,” pronounced Allison, glancing at it courteously, and the elderly stockholders, knotted in little anxious groups, took a certain amount of reassurance from the change of expression on the president’s face.

The president reached for his gavel and called the meeting. The stockholders, grey and grave, and some with watery eyes, drew up their chairs to the long table; for they were directors, too. They answered to their names, and they listened to the minutes, and waded mechanically through the routine business, always with their gaze straying to the new force which had come among them. Every man there knew all about Edward E. Allison. He had combined the traction interests of New York by methods as logical and unsympathetic as geometry, and where he appeared, no matter how pacific his avowed intentions, there were certain to be radical upheavings.

Election of officers was reached in the routine, and again that solemn inquiry in the faded eyes. The “official slate” was proposed in nomination. Edward E. Allison voted with the rest. Every director was re-elected!

New business. Again the solemn inquiry.

“Move to amend Article Three Section One of the constitution, relating to duration of office,” announced Allison, passing the written motion to the secretary. “On a call from the majority of stock, the stockholders of the L. and C. Railroad have a right to demand a special meeting, on one week’s notice, for the purpose of re-organisation and re-election.”

They knew it. It had to come. However, three men on the board had long held the opinion that any change was for the better, and one of these, a thin, old man with a nose so blue that it looked as if it had been dyed to match his necktie, immediately seconded.

Edward E. Allison waited just long enough to vote his majority stock, and left the meeting in a hurry, for he had an engagement to take tea with Gail Sargent.

He allowed himself four hours for sleep that night, and the next afternoon headed for Denver. On the way he studied maps again, but the one to which he paid most attention was a new one drawn by himself, on which the various ranges of the Rocky Mountains were represented by scrawled, lead-pencilled spirals. Right where his thin line crossed these spirals at a converging point, was Yando Chasm, a pass created by nature, which was the proud possession of the Inland Pacific, now the most prosperous and direct of all the Pacific systems; and the Inland, with an insolent pride in the natural fortune which had been found for it by the cleverest of all engineers, guarded its precious right of way as no jewel was ever protected. Just east of Yando Chasm there crossed a little “one-horse” railroad, which, starting at the important city of Silverknob, served some good mining towns below the Inland’s line, and on the north side curved up and around through the mountains, rambling wherever there was freight or passengers to be carried, and ending on the other side of the range at Nugget City, only twenty miles north of the Inland’s main line, and a hundred miles west, into the fair country which sloped down to the Pacific. This road, which had its headquarters in Denver, was called the Silverknob and Nugget City; and into its meeting walked Allison, with control.

His course here was different from that in Jersey City. He ousted every director on the board, and elected men of his own. Immediately after, in the directors’ meeting, he elected himself president, and, kindly consenting to talk with the reporters of the Denver newspapers, hurried back to Chicago, where he drove directly to the head offices of the Inland Pacific.

“I’ve just secured control of the Silverknob and Nugget City,” he informed the general manager of the Inland.

“So I noticed,” returned Wilcox, who was a young man of fifty and wore picturesque velvet hats. “The papers here made quite a sensation of your going into railroading.”

“They’re welcome,” grinned Allison. “Say Wilcox, if you’ll build a branch from Pines to Nugget City, we’ll give you our Nugget City freight where we cross, at Copperville, east of the range.”

Wilcox headed for his map.

“What’s the distance?” he inquired.

“Twenty-two miles; fairly level grade, and one bridge.”

“Couldn’t think of it,” decided Wilcox, looking at the map. “We’d like to have your freight, for there’s a lot of traffic between Silverknob and Nugget City, but it’s not our territory. The smelters are at Silverknob, and they ship east over the White Range Line. Anyway, why do you want to take away the haulage from your northern branch?”

“Figure on discontinuing it. The grades are steep, the local traffic is light, and the roadbed is in a rotten condition. It needs rebuilding throughout. I’ll make you another proposition. I’ll build the line from Pines to Nugget City myself, if you’ll give us track connection at Copperville and at Pines, and will give us a traffic contract for our own rolling stock on a reasonable basis.”

Again Wilcox looked at the map. The Silverknob and Nugget City road began nowhere and ran nowhere, so far as the larger transportation world was concerned, and it could never figure as a competitor. The hundred miles through the precious natural pass known as Yando Chasm, was not so busy a stretch of road as it was important, and the revenue from the passage of the Silverknob and Nugget City’s trains would deduct considerably from the expense of maintaining that much-prized key to the golden west.

“I’ll take it up with Priestly and Gorman,” promised Wilcox.

“How soon can you let me know?”

“Monday.”

That afternoon saw Allison headed back for New York, and the next morning he popped into the offices of the Pacific Slope and Puget Sound, where he secured a rental privilege to run the trains of the Orange Valley Road into San Francisco, and down to Los Angeles, over the tracks of the P. S. and P. S. The Orange Valley was a little, blind pocket of a road, which made a juncture with the P. S. and P. S. just a short haul above San Francisco, and it ran up into a rich fruit country, but its terminus was far, far away from any possible connection with a northwestern competitor; and that bargain was easy.

That night, Allison, glowing with an exultation which erased his fatigue, dressed to call on Gail Sargent.

CHAPTER VI
THE IMPULSIVE YOUNG MAN FROM HOME

Music resounded in the parlours of Jim Sargent’s house; music so sweet and compelling in its harmony that Aunt Grace slipped to the head of the stairs, to listen in mingled ecstasy and pride. Up through the hallway floated a clear, mellow soprano and a rich, deep baritone, blended so perfectly that they seemed twin tones. Aunt Grace, drawn by a fascination she could not resist, crept down to where she could see the source of the melody. Gail, exceptionally pretty to-night in her simple little dove-coloured gown with its one pink rose, sat at the piano, while towering above her, with his chest expanded and a look of perfect peace on his face, stood the Reverend Smith Boyd.

Enraptured, Aunt Grace stood and listened until the close of the ballad. Leafing through her music for the next treat, Gail looked up at the young rector, and made some smiling remark. Her shining brown hair, waving about her forehead, was caught up in a simple knot at the back, and the delicate colour of her cheeks was like the fresh glow of dawn. The Reverend Smith Boyd bent slightly to answer, and he, too, smiled as he spoke; but as he happened to find himself gazing deep into the brown eyes of Gail, the smile began to fade, and Aunt Grace Sargent, scared, ran back up the stairs and into her own room, where she took a book, and held it in her lap, upside down. The remark which Gail had made was this:

“You should have used your voice professionally.”

The reply of the rector was:

“I do.”

“I didn’t mean oratorically,” she laughed, then returned nervously to her search for the next selection. She had seen that change in his smile. “It is so rare to find a perfect speaking voice coupled with a perfect singing voice,” she rattled on. “Here’s that simple little May Song. Just harmony, that’s all.”

Once more their voices rose in that perfect blending which is the most delicate of all exhilarations. In the melody itself there was an appealing sympathy, and, in that moment, these two were in as perfect accord as their voices. There is something in the music of the human tone which exerts a magnetic attraction like no other in the world; which breaks down the barriers of antagonism, which sweeps away the walls of self entrenchment, which attracts and draws, which explains and does away with explanation. This was the first hour they had spent without a clash, and the Reverend Smith Boyd, his eyes quite blue to-night, brought another stack of music from the rack.

The butler, an aggravating image with only one joint in his body, paraded solemnly through the hall, and back again with the card tray, while Gail and the rector sang “Juanita” from an old college song book, which the Reverend Boyd had discovered in high glee. Aunt Grace came down the stairs and out past the doors of the music salon. There were voices of animated greeting in the hall, and Aunty returned to the door just as the rector was spreading open the book at “Sweet and Low.”

“Pardon me,” beamed Aunty. “There’s a little surprise out here for you.”

“For me?” and Gail rose, with a smile and a pretty little nod of apology.

She moved with swiftly quiet grace into the hall. There was a little half shrieking exclamation. The rector, setting a chair smilingly for Mrs. Sargent, happened, quite unwittingly, to come in range of the hall mirror at the moment of the half shriek, and he saw an impulsive young man grab Gail Sargent in his arms, and kiss her!

“Howard!” protested Gail, in the midst of embarrassed laughter; and presently she came in, rosy-cheeked, with the impulsive young man, whose hair was inclined to thinness in front. He was rather good-looking, on second inspection, with a sharp eye and a brisk manner and a healthy complexion.

“Mr. Clemmens, Doctor Boyd,” introduced Gail, and there was the ring of genuine pleasure in her voice. “Mr. Clemmens is one of my very best friends from back home,” and she viewed this one of her very best friends with pride as he shook hands with the Reverend Smith Boyd. He was easy of manner, was Mr. Clemmens, even confident, though he had scarcely the ease which does not need self-assertion.

“I am delighted to meet any friend of Miss Sargent,” admitted the rector, in that flowing, mellow baritone which no one heard for the first time without surprise.

“Allow me to say the same,” returned the young man from back home, making a critical and jealous inspection of the disturbingly commanding rector. His voice was brisk, staccato, and a trifle high pitched. Gail had always admired it, not for its musical quality, of course, but for its clean-cut decisiveness.

“When did you arrive?” asked Mrs. Sargent, with hospitable interest.

“Just this minute,” stated Clemmens, exchanging a glance of pleasure with Gail. “I only stopped at the hotel long enough to throw in my luggage, and drove straight on here.” He turned to her so expectantly that the rector rose.

“You’re not going?” protested Gail, and was startled to find that the Reverend Smith Boyd’s eyes were no longer blue. They were cold.

“I’m afraid that I must,” he answered her in the conventional apologetic tone, which was not at all like his singing voice. It sounded rather inflexible, and as if it might not blend very well. “I trust that I shall have the pleasure of meeting you again, Mr. Clemmens,” and he shook hands with the brisk young man in a most dignified fashion. He bowed his frigid adieus to the ladies, and marched into the hall for his hat.

“Rector?” guessed Mr. Clemmens, when the outer door had closed.

“Of Market Square Church,” proudly asserted Aunt Grace. “He is a wonderfully gifted young man. The rectory is right next door.”

“Oh yes,” responded Mr. Clemmens perfunctorily, and he turned slowly to Gail. “Fine looking chap, isn’t he?”

Gail bridled a trifle. She knew that trick of jealous interrogation quite well. Howard was trying to surprise her into some facial expression which would betray her attitude toward the Reverend Smith Boyd.

“He’s perfectly splendid!” she beamed. “He has the richest baritone I’ve ever heard.”

“It blends so perfectly with Gail’s,” supplemented the admiring Aunt Grace. “We must have him over so you may hear them sing.”

“I’ll be delighted,” lied Mr. Clemmens, shooting another glance of displeasure at Gail.

Somehow, Aunt Grace felt that there was an atmosphere of discomfort in the room, and she thought she had better go upstairs, to worry about it.

“You’ll take dinner with us to-morrow evening, I hope,” she cordially invited.

“You won’t have to ask me twice,” laughed Mr. Clemmens, rising because Aunt Grace did. He was always punctilious, and the manner of his courtesies showed that he was punctilious.

“Well, girl, tell me all about it,” heartily began the young man from home, when Aunty had made her apologies and her departure. He imprisoned her hand in his, and seated her on the couch, and sat beside her, crossing his legs comfortably.

“I’ve been having a delightful time,” replied Gail. “Suppose we go over to the blue room, Howard. It’s much more pleasant, I think.” She wanted to be away from the piano. It distressed her.

“All right,” cheerfully acquiesced Howard, and, still retaining her hand, he went over with her into the blue room, and seated her on the couch, and sat beside her, and crossed his legs. “We made up our monthly report just before I came. Our rate of increase is over ten per cent. better than in any previous month since we began. Three more years, and we’ll have the biggest insurance business in the state; that is, except the big outside companies.”

“Isn’t that splendid!” and her enthusiasm was fine to see. She had been kept posted on the progress of the Midwest Mutual Insurance Company since its inception, and naturally she was very much interested. “Then you’ll branch out into other states.”

“Not for ten years to come,” he told her, smiling at her woman-like overestimate. “The Midwest won’t do that until we’ve covered the home territory so thoroughly that there’ll be no chance of further expansion. My board of directors brought up that matter at the last meeting, but I turned it down flat-footed. I’m enterprising enough, but I’m thorough. The president has thrown the entire responsibility on my shoulders, and I won’t take any foolish risks.”

Gail turned to him in clear-eyed speculation.

“If I were a man, I’m afraid I’d be a business gambler,” she mused.

“I’ve no doubt you would,” he comfortably laughed. “However, my method is the safest. Ten years from now, Gail, I’ll have money that I made myself, and, in twenty, I’ll be shamelessly rich. Sounds good, doesn’t it?”

“You have enough money now, if that’s all you want,” she reminded him.

“No, I’m ambitious,” he insisted. “Not for myself, though. Gail, you know why I made this trip,” and he bent closer to her. His staccato voice softened and his eyes were very earnest. “I couldn’t stay away.” He clasped his other hand over hers, and drew closer.

“I told you you mustn’t, Howard,” she gently chided him, though she made no attempt to withdraw her hand. “I’m not ready yet to decide about things.”

He was a poor psychologist.

“All right,” he cheerfully assented, dropping the earnestness from his voice and from his eyes, but retaining her hand. His clasp was warm and strong and wholesome. “Mrs. King’s ball was rather a tame affair this year, though I may have been prejudiced because you weren’t there.”

He drifted easily into chat of home people and affairs, and she felt more and more contented every minute. After all, he was of her own people, linked to them and to her. It was comfortable to be with some one whom one thoroughly understood. There was no recess of his mind with which she was not intimately acquainted. She could foretell his mental processes as easily as she could read the time on her watch. It was tremendously restful, after her contact with the stronger personalities which she had found here. She had been wondering in what indefinable manner Howard had changed, but now she began to see that it was she who had shifted her viewpoint. The men she had met here, with the exception of such as Van Ploon and Cunningham and Ted Teasdale, were far more complex than Howard, a quality which at times might be more interesting than agreeable.

A rush of noise filled the hall. Lucile and Ted Teasdale, handsome Dick Rodley and Arly Fosland and Houston Van Ploon, had come clattering in as an escort for Mrs. Davies, whose pet fad was to have as many young people as possible bring her home from any place.

The young man from back home took his plunge into that vortex with becoming steadiness. Gail had looked to see him a trifle bewildered, and would have had small criticism for him if he had, but he greeted them all on a friendly basis, and, sitting down again beside her, crossed his legs, while Mrs. Davies calmly lorgnetted him.

“Where’s the baby?” demanded handsome Dick Rodley, heading for the stairs.

“Silly, you mustn’t!” cried Lucile, and started after him. “Flakes should be asleep at this hour.”

“I came in for the sole purpose of teaching Flakes the turkey trot,” declared handsome Dick, and ran away, followed by Lucile.

“Lucile’s becoming passé,” criticised Ted. “She’s flirting with Rodley for the second time.”

“Can you blame her?” defended Arly, stealing a surreptitious glance at the young man from back home, then the devil of mischief seized her and she leaned forward. “Do you flirt, Mr. Clemmens?”

For once the easy assurance of Howard left him, and he blushed. The stiff, but kindly disposed Van Ploon came to his rescue.

“Perhaps Mr. Clemmens is not yet married,” he suggested.

To save him, Clemmens, used, under any circumstances, to the easy sang froid of the insurance business, could not keep himself from turning to Gail with accusing horror in his eyes. Was this the sort of company she kept? He glanced over at Arly Fosland. She was sitting in the deep corner of her favourite couch, nursing a slender ankle, and even her shining black hair, to say nothing of her shining black eyes, seemed to be snapping with wicked delight. It was so unusual to find a young man one could shock.

Lucile and handsome Dick came struggling down the stairway with Flakes between them, and Gail sprang instantly to take the bewildered puppy from them both. Little blonde Lucile gave up her interest to the prior right, but Rodley pretended to be obstinate about it. His deep eyes burned down into Gail’s, as he stood bending above her, and his smile, to Howard’s concentrated gaze, had in it that dangerous fascination which few women could resist! Gail was positively smiling up into his eyes!

“Tableau!” called Ted. “All ready for the next reel.”

“Hold it a while,” begged Arly, and even the young man from home was forced to admit that the picture was handsome enough to be retained. The Adonislike Dick, with his black hair and black eyes, his curly black moustache and his black goatee, his pink cheeks and his white teeth; Gail, gracefully erect, her head thrown back, her brown hair waving and her eyes dancing; the Adonis bending over her and the fluffy white Flakes between them; it was painfully beautiful; and Mr. Clemmens suddenly regretted his square-toed shoes and his business suit.

“Children, go home,” suddenly commanded Mrs. Davies. “Dick, put the dog back where you found it.”

“I suppose we’ll have to go home,” drawled Ted. “Dick, put back that dog.”

“Put away the dog, Dick,” ordered the heavier voice of young Van Ploon. “Come along, Gail, I’ll put him away.”

At his approach, Dick placed the puppy, with great care, in Gail’s charge, and took her arm. Van Ploon took her other arm, and together the trio, laughing, went away to return Flakes to his bed. They clung to her most affectionately, bending over her on either side; and they called her Gail!

The others were ready to go when they returned from the collie nursery, and the three young men stood for a moment in a row near the door. Gail looked them over with a puzzled expression. What was there about them which was so attractive? Was it poise, sureness, polish, breeding, experience, insolence, grooming—what? Even the stiff Van Ploon seemed smooth of bearing to-night!

“Come home, Gail,” begged Clemmens, when the noisy party had laughed its way out of the door and Aunt Helen Davies had gone upstairs.

She knew what was in his mind, but compassion overcame her resentment, because there was suffering in his voice and in his eyes. She smiled on him forgivingly, and did not withdraw the hand he took again.

“New York’s an evil place,” he urged. “Who are these friends of yours?” and he looked at her accusingly.

“Why, they are tremendously nice people, Howard,” she told him, forgiving him again because he did not understand. “Lucile is the pretty cousin about whom I wrote you, Ted is her husband, and the others are their friends.”

“I don’t like them,” he rather sternly said. “They are not fit company for you. They see no sacredness in marriage, with their open flirting.”

“Why, Howard, that’s only a joke. Ted and Lucile are exceptionally devoted to each other.” She turned and studied him seriously. Was he smaller of stature than he had seemed back home, or what was it?

They still were standing in the hall, and the front door opened.

“Brought you a prodigal,” hailed Uncle Jim, slipping his latchkey in his pocket as he held the door open for the prodigal in question. “Hello, Clemmens. When did you blow in?” and he advanced to shake hands.

Gail was watching the doorway. Some one outside was vigorously stamping his feet. The prodigal came in, and proved to be Allison, buoyant of step, sparkling of eye, firm of jaw, and ruddy from the night wind. Smiling with the sureness of welcome, he came eagerly up to Gail, and took her hand, retaining it until she felt compelled to withdraw it, recognising again that thrill. The barest trace of a flush came into her cheeks, and paled again.

“Allison, meet one of Chubsy’s friends from home,” called Uncle Jim. “Mr. Allison, Mr. Clemmens.”

As the two shook hands, Gail turned again to the young man from back home. Yes, he had grown smaller.

CHAPTER VII
THEY HAD ALREADY SPOILED HER!

Gail faltered when, after bidding good-night to her uncle and to Allison, she turned and met the look in Howard Clemmens’ eyes. She knew that the inevitable moment had arrived. He walked straight up to her, and there was a new dignity in him, a new strength, a new resolve. For a moment, as he advanced, she thought that he was about to put his arms around her, but he did not. Instead, he took her hand, in his old characteristic way, and led her into the library, and seated her on the couch, and sat beside her.

“Gail, come home with me,” he said, authoritative but kind. He had been her recognised suitor from childhood. He had shut out all the other boys.

She withdrew her hand, but without deliberate intent. She had felt the instinctive and imperative need of touching her two hands together in her lap.

“You’re asking something impossible, Howard,” she returned, quietly. Her voice was low, and her beautiful brown eyes, half veiled by their long lashes, were watching the play of light in a ruby on one of her fingers. She was deep in abstracted thought, struggling vaguely with problems which he could not know, and of which she herself was as yet but dimly conscious.

“Come home, and marry me.” Perfectly patient, perfectly confident, perfectly gentle. He reached for her hand again, and took them both, still clasped, in his own. “Gail, we’ve waited quite long enough. It’s not doing either one of us any good for you to be here. The best thing is for us to be married right now.”

For the first time she turned her eyes full upon him.

“You are taking a great deal for granted, Howard,” and she wore a calm decision which he had not before seen in her. “There has never been any agreement between us.”

“There has been an understanding,” he retorted, releasing her unresponsive hands and looking her squarely in the eyes, with a slight frown on his brow.

“Never,” she incisively reminded him, and her piquant chin pointed upwards. “I’ve always told you that I could make no promises.”

That came as a shock and a surprise. It could not be possible that she did not care for him!

“Why, Gail dear, I love you!” he suddenly told her, with more fervour than she had ever heard in his tone. He slipped from the edge of the couch to his knee on the floor, where he could look up into her downcast eyes. He put his arm around her, and drew her closer. He clasped her hands in his own strong palm. “Listen, Gail dear; we grew up together.” He was tender now, tender and pleading, and his voice had in it ranges of modulation which it had never developed before this night. “You were my very first sweetheart; and the only one. Even as a boy in school, when you were only a little kiddie, I made up my mind to marry you, and I’ve never given up that dream. All my life I’ve loved you, stronger and deeper as the years went on, until now the love that is in me sways every thought, every action, every emotion. I love you, Gail dear! All my heart and all my soul is in it.”

She had not drawn away from his embrace, she had not removed her hands from his clasp; instead, she had yielded somewhat towards this old friend.

“I can’t do without you any longer, Gail!” he impetuously went on, detecting that yielding in her. “You must marry me! Tell me that you will!”

She disengaged herself from him very gently.

“I can’t, Howard.” Her voice was so low that he could scarcely catch the words, and her face was filled with sorrow.

He held tense and rigid where she had left him.

“You can’t,” he repeated, numbly.

“It is impossible,” and her face cleared of all its perplexity. She was grave, and serious, and saddened; but still sure. “For the first time I know my own mind clearly, and I know that I do not now, and never can, care for you in the way you wish.”

He rose abruptly and stood before her. His brows were knotted, and there was a hard look on his face.

“I came too late!” he bitterly charged. “They’ve already spoiled you!”

Gail sprang from the couch, and a round red spot flashed into each cheek. She had never looked so beautiful as when she stood before him, her tiny fists clenched and her eyes blazing. She almost replied to him, then she rang the bell for the butler, and hurried upstairs. Wild as was her tumult, she stood with her hand on the knob of her dressing-room until she heard the front door open and close; then she ran in and threw herself downward on the chintz-covered divan, and cried!

She sat up presently, and remembered that the dove-coloured gown was her pet. With a quite characteristic ability of self-segregation, she put out of her mind, except for the dull ache of it, the tangled vortex of distress until she had changed her garments and let down her waving hair, and, disdaining the help of her maid, performed all the little nightly duties, to the putting away of her clothing. Then, in a perfectly neat and orderly boudoir, she sat down to take herself seriously in hand.

First of all, there was Howard. She must cleanse her conscience of him for all time to come. In just how far had she encouraged him; in how far was he justified in assuming there to be an “understanding” between them? It was true that they had grown up together. It was true that, from the first moment she had begun to be entertained by young men, she had permitted him to be her most frequent escort. She had liked him better than all the others; had trusted him, relied on him, commanded him. Perhaps she had been selfish in that; but no, she had given at least as much pleasure as she had received in that companionship. More; for as her beauty had ripened with her years, Howard had been more and more exacting in his jealousy, in his claims upon her for the rights and the rewards of past service. Had she been guilty in submitting to this mild form of dictatorship, and, by permitting it, had she vested in him the right to expect it? Possibly. She set that weakness to one side, as a mark against her.

Then had come the age of ardour, when a more serious note crept into their relation. It was the natural end and aim of all girls to become married, and, as she blossomed into the full flower of her young womanhood, this end and aim had been constantly borne in on her by all her friends and relatives, by her parents, her girl chums, and by Howard. They had convinced her that this was the case, and, in consequence, the logical candidate was the young man who had expended all his time and energy in trying to please her. How much of a debt was that? Well, it was an obligation, she gravely considered, with her dimpled chin in her hand. An obligation which should be repaid—with grateful friendship.

She was compelled to admit, being an honest and a just young person, that at various times she had herself considered Howard Clemmens the logical candidate. She must be married some time, and Howard was the most congenial young man of all her acquaintance. He was of an excellent family, had proved his right to exist by the fact that he had gone into business when he had plenty of money to live in idleness, was well-mannered, cheerful, good-natured, self-sacrificing, and an adorer whose admiration was consistent and unfaltering. Even—she confessed this to herself with self-resentment for having confessed it—even at the time she had left for New York, she had been fairly well settled in her mind that she would come back, and invite all her hosts of friends to see her marry Howard, and they would build a new house just the way she wanted it, and entertain, and some day she would be a prominent member of the Browning Circle.

However, she had never, by any single syllable, hinted to Howard, or any one else, that this might be the case, and her only fault could lie in thinking it. Now, just how far could Howard divine this mental attitude, and just how far might that mental attitude influence her actions and general bearing toward Howard, so that he might be justified in feeling that there was an actual understanding between them?

She did not know. She was only sure that she was perfectly miserable. She had yielded to a fit of impetuous anger, and had sent away her lifelong friend without a word of good-bye, and he had been a dear, good fellow who had been ready to bark, or fetch and carry, or lie down and roll over, at the word of command; and they had been together so much, and he had always been so kind and considerate and generous, and he was from back home, and he did really and truly love her very much, and she was homesick; and she cried again.

She sat upright with a jerk, and dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief, which was composed of one square inch of linen entirely surrounded by embroidered holes. She had been perfectly right in sending Howard away without a good-bye. He had insulted her friends and her, most grossly; he had been nasty and unreasonable; he had been presumptuous and insolent; his voice was harsh and he had crossed his legs in a fashion which showed his square-toed shoe at an ugly angle. She had never seen anybody cross his legs in just that way. “They had spoiled her already!” Indeed! Why had she not waited long enough to assert herself? Why had she not told him what a conceited creature he was? Why had she not said all the hot, bitter, stinging things which had popped into her mind at the time? There were half a dozen better and more scornful ways in which she could have sent him away than by merely calling the butler and running upstairs. She might even have stretched out her hand imperiously and said “Go!” upon which thought she laughed at herself, and dabbed her eyes with that absurdity which she called a handkerchief.

There was knock at the door and, on invitation, the tall and stately Mrs. Helen Davies came in, frilled and ruffled for the night. She found the dainty, little guest boudoir in green tinted dimness. Gail had turned down all the lights in the room except the green lamps under the canopy, and she sat on the divan, with her brown hair rippling about her shoulders, her knees clasped in her arms, and her dainty little boudoir slippers peeping from her flowing pink negligee, while the dim green light, suited to her present sombre reflections, only enhanced the clear pink of her complexion. Mrs. Davies sat down in front of her.

“Mr. Clemmens proposed to you to-night,” she charged, gleaning that fact from experienced observation.

Gail nodded her head.

“I hope you did not accept him.”

The brown ripples shook sidewise.

“I was quite certain that you would not,” and the older woman’s tone was one of distinct relief. “In fact, I did not see how you could. The young man is in no degree a match for you.”

There was a contemptuous disapproval in her tone which brought Gail’s head up.

“You don’t know Howard!” she flared. “He is one of the nicest young men at home. He is perfectly good and kind and dear, and I was hateful to him!” and Gail’s chin quivered.

Aunt Helen rendered first aid to the injured in the tenderest of manners. She moved over to the other side of Gail where she could surround her, and laid the brown head on her shoulder.

“I know just how you feel,” she soothingly said. “You’ve had to refuse to marry a good friend, and you are reproaching yourself because you were compelled to hurt him. Of course you are unfair to yourself, and you feel perfectly miserable, and you will for a while; but the main point is that you refused him.”

Gail, whose quick intelligence no intonation escaped, lay comfortably on Aunt Helen’s shoulder, and a clear little laugh rippled up. She could not see the smile of satisfaction and relief with which Aunt Helen Davies received that laugh.

“My dear, I am quite well pleased with you,” went on the older woman. “If you handle all your affairs so sensibly, you have a brilliant future before you.”

Gail’s eyelids closed; the long, brown lashes curved down on her cheeks, revealing just a sparkle of brightness, while the mischievous little smile twitched at the corners of her lips.

“If you were an ordinary girl, I would urge you, to-night, to make a selection among the exceptionally excellent matrimonial material of which you have a choice, but, with your extraordinary talents and beauty, my advice is just to the contrary. You should delay until you have had a wider opportunity for judgment. You have not as yet shown any marked preference, I hope.”

Gail’s quite unreasoning impulse was to giggle, but she clothed her voice demurely.

“No, Aunt Helen.”

“You are remarkably wise,” complimented Aunt Helen, a bit of appreciation which quite checked Gail’s impulse to giggle. “In the meantime, it is just as well to study your opportunities. Of course there’s Dick Rodley, whom no one considers seriously, and Willis Cunningham, whose one and only drawback is such questionable health that he might persistently interfere with your social activities. Houston Van Ploon, I am frank to say, is the most eligible of all, and to have attracted his attention is a distinct triumph. Mr. Allison, while rather advanced in years—”

“Please!” cried Gail. “You’d think I was a horse.”

“I know just how you feel,” stated Aunt Helen, entirely unruffled; “but you have your future to consider, and I wish to invite your confidence,” and in her voice there was the quaver of much concern.

“Thank you, Aunt Helen,” said Gail, realising the sincerity of the older woman’s intentions, and, putting her arms around Mrs. Davies’ neck, she kissed her. “It is dear of you to take so much interest.”

“I think it’s pride,” confessed Mrs. Davies, naïvely. “I won’t keep you up a minute longer, Gail. Go to bed, and get all the sleep you can. Only sleep will keep those roses in your cheeks. Good-night,” and with a parting caress, she went to her own room, with a sense of a duty well performed.

Gail smiled retrospectively, and tried the blue light under the canopy lamp, but turned it out immediately. The green gave a much better effect of moonlight on the floor.

She called herself back out of the mists of her previous distress. Who was this Gail, and what was she? There had come a new need in her, a new awakening. Something seemed to have changed in her, to have crystallised. Whatever this crystallisation was, it had made her know that she could not marry Howard Clemmens. It had made her know, too, that marriage was not to be looked upon as a mere inevitable social episode. Her thoughts flew back to Aunt Helen. Her eyelashes brushed her cheeks, and the little smile of sarcasm twitched the corners of her lips.

Aunt Helen’s list of eligibles. Gail reviewed them now deliberately; not with the thought of the social advantages they might offer her, but as men. She reviewed others whom she had met. For the first time in her life, she was frankly and self-consciously interested in men; curious about them. She had reached her third stage of development; the fairy prince age, the “I suppose I shall have to be married one day” age, and now the age of conscious awakening. She wondered, in some perplexity, as to what had brought about her nascence; rather, and she knitted her pretty brows, who had brought it about.

The library clock chimed the hour, and startled her out of her reverie. She turned on the lights, and sat in front of her mirror to give her hair one of those extra brushings for which it was so grateful, and which it repaid with so much beauty. She paused deliberately to study herself in the glass. Why, this was a new Gail, a more potent Gail. What was it Allison had said about her potentialities? Allison. Strong, forceful, aggressive Allison. He was potence itself. A thrill of his handclasp clung with her yet, and a slight flush crept into her cheeks.

Aunt Grace had worried about Jim’s little cold, and the distant mouse she thought she heard, and the silver chest, and Lucile’s dangerous looking new horse, until all these topics had failed, when she detected the unmistakable click of a switch-button near by. It must be in Gail’s suite. Hadn’t the child retired yet? She lay quite still pondering that mighty question for ten minutes, and then, unable to rest any longer, she slipped out of bed and across the hall. There was no light coming from under the doors of either the boudoir or the bedroom, so Aunt Grace peeped into the latter apartment, then she tiptoed softly away. Gail, in her cascade of pink flufferies, was at the north window, kneeling, with her earnest face upturned to one bright pale star.

CHAPTER VIII
STILL PIECING OUT THE WORLD

The map of the United States in Edward E. Allison’s library began, now, to develop little streaks of red. They were not particularly long streaks, but they were boldly marked, and they hugged, with extraordinary closeness, the pencil mark which Allison had drawn from New York to Chicago and from Chicago to San Francisco. There were long gaps between them, but these did not seem to worry him very much. It was the little stretches, sometimes scarcely over an inch, which he drew with such evident pleasure from day to day, and now, occasionally, as he passed in and out, he stopped by the big globe and gave it a contemplative whirl. On the day he joined his far western group of little marks by bridging three small gaps, he received a caller in the person of a short, well-dressed, old man, who walked with a cane and looked half asleep, by reason of the many puffs which had piled up under his eyes and nearly closed them.

“I’m ready to wind up, Tim,” remarked Allison, offering his caller a cigar, and lighting one himself. “When can we have that Vedder Court property condemned?”

“Whenever you give the word,” reported Tim Corman, who spoke with an asthmatic voice, and with the quiet dignity of a man who had borne grave business responsibilities, and had borne them well.

Allison nodded his head in satisfaction.

“You’re sure there can’t be any hitch in it.”

“Not if I say it’s all right,” and the words were Tim’s only reproof. His tone was perfectly level, and there was no glint in his eyes. Offended dignity had nothing to do with business. “Give me one week’s notice, and the Vedder Court property will be condemned for the city terminal of the Municipal Transportation Company. Appraisement, thirty-one million.”

“I only wanted to be reassured,” apologised Allison. “I took your word that you could swing it when I made my own gamble, but now I have to drag other people into it.”

“That’s right,” agreed Tim. “I never get offended over straight business.” In other times Tim Corman would have said “get sore,” but, as he neared the end of his years of useful activity, he was making quite a specialty of refinement, and stocking a picture gallery, and becoming a connoisseur collector of rare old jewels. He dressed three times a day.

“How about the Crescent Island subway?”

“Ripe any time,” and Tim Corman flecked the ashes from his cigar with a heavily gemmed hand. “The boosters have been working on it right along, but never too strong.”

“There’s no need for any particular manipulation in that,” decided Allison, who knew the traction situation to the last nickel. “The city needs that outlet, and it needs the new territory which will be opened up. I think we’d better push the subway right on across to the mainland. The extension would have to be made in ten years anyhow.”

“It’s better right now,” immediately assented Corman. In ten years he might be dead.

“I think, too, that we’d better provide for a heavy future expansion,” went on Allison, glancing expectantly into Tim’s old eyes. “We’d probably better provide for a double-deck, eight track tube.”

Tim Corman drew a wheezy breath, and then he grinned the senile shadow of his old-time grin; but it still had the same spirit.

“You got a hen on,” he deduced. In “society,” Tim could manage very nicely to use fashionable language, but, in business, he found it impossible after the third or fourth minute of conversation. He had taken in every detail of the room on his entrance, and his glance had strayed more than once to the red streaks on the big map. Now he approached it, and studied it with absorbed interest. “You’re a smart boy, Ed,” he concluded. “Across Crescent Island is the only leak where you could snake in a railroad. You found the only crack that the big systems haven’t tied up.”

“All you can get me to admit, just now, is that the city needs an eight track tube across Crescent Island, under lease to the Municipal Transportation Company,” stated Allison, smiling with gratification. A compliment of this sort from shrewd old Tim Corman, who was reputed to be the foxiest man in the world, was a tribute highly flattering.

“That’s right,” approved Tim. “All I know is a guess, and I don’t tell guesses. This is a big job, though, Eddie. A subway to Crescent Island, under proper restrictions, is just an ordinary year’s work for the boys, but this tube pokes its nose into Oakland Bay.”

“I’m quite aware of the size of the job,” chuckled Allison. “However, Tim, there’ll be money enough behind this proposition to fill that tube with greenbacks.”

Between the narrow-slitted and puffy eyelids of Tim Corman there gleamed a trace of the old-time genii.

“Then it’s built.” He rose and leaned on his cane, twinkling down on the man who, years before, he had picked as a “comer.” “I’ve heard people say that money’s wicked, but they never had any. When I die, and go down to the big ferry, if the Old Boy comes along and offers me enough money, I’ll go to Hell.”

Still laughing, Allison telephoned to the offices of the Midcontinent Railroad, and dashed out to his runabout just in time to see Tim Corman driving around the corner in his liveried landau. He found in President Urbank, of the Midcontinent, a spare man who had worn three vertical creases in his brow over one thwarted ambition. His rich but sprawling railroad system ran fairly straight after it was well started for Chicago, and fairly straight from that way-point until it became drunken with the monotony of the western foot-hills, where it gangled and angled its way to the far south and around up the Pacific coast, arriving there dusty and rattling, after a thousand mile detour from its course—but that road had no direct entrance into New York city. It approached from the north, and was compelled to circle completely around, over hired tracks, to gain a ferryboat entrance. Passengers inured to coming in over the Midcontinent, which was a well-equipped road otherwise, counted but half their journey done when they came in sight of New York, no matter from what distance they had come.

“Out marketing for railroads to-day, Gil?” suggested Allison.

“I don’t know,” smiled Urbank. “I might look at a few.”

“Here they are,” and Allison tossed him a memorandum slip.

Urbank glanced at the slip, then he looked up at Allison in perplexity. He had a funny forward angle to his neck when he was interested, and the creases in his brow were deepened until they looked like cuts.

“I thought you were joking, and I’m still charitable enough to think so. What’s all this junk?”

“Little remnants and job lots of railroads I’ve been picking up,” and Allison drew forward his chair. “Some I bought outright, and in some I hold control.”

“If you’re serious about interesting the Midcontinent in any of this property, we don’t need to waste much time.” Urbank leaned back and held his knee. “There are only two of these roads approach the Midcontinent system at any point, and they are useless property so far as we are concerned; the L. and C., in the east, and the Silverknob and Nugget City, in the west, which touches our White Range branch at its southern terminus. We couldn’t do anything with those.”

“You landed on the best ones right away,” smiled Allison. “However, I don’t propose to sell these to the Midcontinent. I propose to absorb the Midcontinent with them.”

Urbank suddenly remembered Allison’s traction history, and leaned forward to look at the job lots and remnants again.

“This list isn’t complete,” he judged, and turned to Allison with a serious question in his eye.

“Almost,” and Allison hitched a little closer to the desk. “There remains an aggregate of three hundred and twenty miles of road to be built in four short stretches. In addition to this, I have a twenty year contract over a hundred mile stretch of the Inland Pacific, a track right entry into San Francisco, and this,” and he displayed to Urbank a preliminary copy of an ordinance, authorising the immediate building of an eight track tube through Crescent Island to the mainland. “Possibly you can understand this whole project better if I show you a map,” and he spread out his little pocket sketch.

If it had been possible to reverse the processes of time and worry and wearing concentration, President Urbank, of the Midcontinent, would have raised from his inspection of that map with a brow as smooth as a baby’s. Instead, his lips went dry, as he craned forward his neck at that funny angle, and projected his chin with the foolish motion of a goose.

“A direct entrance right slam into the centre of New York!” he exclaimed, cracking all his knuckles violently one by one. “Vedder Court! Where’s that?”

“That’s the best part of the joke,” exulted Allison, with no thought that Vedder Court was, at this present moment, church property. “It’s just where you said; right slam in the centre of New York; and the building into which the Midcontinent will run its trains will be also the terminal building of every municipal transportation line in Manhattan! From my station platforms, passengers from Chicago or the Far West will step directly into subway, L., or trolley. When they come in over the line which is now the Midcontinent, they will be landed, not across the river, or in some side street, but right at their own doors, scattering from the Midcontinent terminal over a hundred traction lines!” His voice, which had begun in the mild banter of a man passing an idle joke, had risen to a ring so triumphant that he was almost shouting.

“But—but—wait a minute!” Urbank protested. He was stuttering. “Where does the Midcontinent get to the Crescent Island tube?”

“Right here,” and Allison pointed to his map. “You come out of the tube to the L. and C., which has a long-time tracking privilege over fifty miles of the Towando Valley, and terminates at Windfield. At Forgeson, however, just ten miles after the L. and L. leaves the Towando, that road—”

“Is crossed by our tracks!” Urbank eagerly interpreted. “The Midcontinent, after its direct exit, saves a seventy mile detour! Then it’s a straight shoot for Chicago! Straight on again out west—Why, Allison, your route is almost as straight as an arrow! It will have a three hundred mile shorter haul than even the Inland Pacific! You’ll put that road out of the business! You’ll have the king of transcontinental lines, and none can ever be built that will save one kink!” His neck protruded still further from his collar as he bent over the map. “Here you split off from the Midcontinent’s main line and utilise the White Range branch; from Silverknob—My God!” and his mouth dropped open. “Why—why—why, you cross the big range over the Inland Pacific’s own tracks!” and his voice cracked.

Edward E. Allison, his vanity gratified to its very core, sat back comfortably, smiling and smoking, until Urbank awoke.

“I suppose we can come to some arrangement,” he mildly suggested.

Urbank looked at him still in a daze for a moment, and a trace of the creases came back into his brow, then they faded away.

“You figured all this out before you came to me,” he remarked. “On what terms do we get in?”

CHAPTER IX
THE MINE FOR THE GOLDEN ALTAR

Vedder Court was a very drunkard among tenement groups. Its decrepit old wooden buildings, as if weak-kneed from dissipation and senile decay, leaned against each other crookedly for support, and leered down, at the sodden swarms beneath, out of broken-paned windows which gave somehow a ludicrous effect of bleared eyes. A heartless civic impulse had once burdened them with fire escapes, and these, though they were comparatively new, had already partaken of the general decay, and looked, with their motley cluttering of old bedding, and nondescript garments hung out to dry, and various utensils of the kitchen and laundry, and various unclassified junk, as if they were a sort of foul, fungoid growth which had taken root from the unspeakable uncleanliness within. There had once been a narrow strip of curbed soil in the centre of the street, where three long-since departed trees had given the quarter its name of “Court,” but this space was now as bare and dry as the asphalt surrounding it, and, as it was too small even for the purpose of children at play, a wooden bench, upon which no one ever sat, as indeed why should they, had long ago been placed on it, to become loose-jointed and weather-splintered and rotted, like all the rest of the neighbourhood.

As for its tenants; they were exactly the sort of birds one might expect to find in such foul nests. They were of many nations, but of just two main varieties; stupid and squalid, or thin and furtive; but they were all dirty, and they bore, in their complexions, the poison of crowded breathing spaces, and bad sewerage, and unwholesome or insufficient food.

Into this mire, on a day when melting snow had fallen and made all underfoot a black, shining, oily, sticky canal, there drove an utterly out-of-place little electric coupé, set low, and its glistening plate glass windows hung with absurd little lace curtains held back by pink ribbon bows. At the wheel was the fresh-cheeked Gail Sargent, in a driving suit and hat and veil of brown, and with her was the twinkling-eyed Rufus Manning, whose white beard rippled down to his second waistcoat button. They drove slowly the length of the court and back again, the girl studying every detail with acute interest. They stopped in front of Temple Mission, which, with its ugly red and blue lettering nearly erased by years of monthly scrubbings, occupied an old store room once used as a saloon.

“So this is the chrysalis from which the butterfly cathedral is to emerge,” commented Gail, as Manning held the door open for her, and before she rose she peered again around the uninviting “court,” which not even the bright winter sunshine could relieve of its dinginess; rather, the sun made it only the more dismal by presenting the ugliness more in detail.

“This is the mine which produces the gold which is to gild the altar,” assented Manning, studying the sidewalk. “I don’t think you’d better come in here. You’ll spoil your shoes.”

“I want to see it all this time because I’m never coming back,” insisted Gail, and placed one daintily shod foot on the step.

“Then I’ll have to shame Sir Walter Raleigh,” laughed the silvery-bearded Manning, and, to her gasping surprise, he caught her around the waist and lifted her across to the door, whereat several soiled urchins laughed, and one vinegary-faced old woman grinned, in horrible appreciation, and dropped Manning a familiarly respectful courtesy.

There was no one in the mission except a broad-shouldered man with a roughly hewn face, who ducked his head at Manning and touched his forefinger to the side of his head. He was placing huge soup kettles in their holes in the counter at the rear of the room, and Manning called attention to this.

“A practical mission,” he explained. “We start in by saving the bodies.”

“Do you get any further?” inquired Gail, glancing from the empty benches and the atrociously coloured “religious” pictures on the walls to the windows, past which eddied a mass of humanity all but submerged in hopelessness.

“Sometimes,” replied Manning gravely. “I have seen a soul or two even here. It is because of these two or three possibilities that the mission is kept up. It might interest you to know that Market Square Church spends fifteen thousand dollars a year in charity relief in Vedder Court alone.”

Gail’s eyelids closed, her lashes curved on her cheeks for an instant, and the corners of her lips twitched.

“And how much a year does Market Square Church take out of Vedder Court?”

“I was waiting for that bit of impertinence,” laughed Manning. “I shall be surprised at nothing you say since that first day when you characterised Market Square Church as a remarkably lucrative enterprise. Have you never felt any compunctions of conscience over that?”

“Not once,” answered Gail promptly. She had started to seat herself on one of the empty benches, but had changed her mind. “If I had been given to any such self-injustice, however, I should reproach myself now. I think Market Square Church not only commercial but criminal.”

“I’ll have to give your soul a chastisement,” smiled Manning. “These people must live somewhere, and because Vedder Court, being church property, is exempt from taxation, they find cheaper rents here than anywhere in the city. If we were to put up improved buildings, I don’t know where they would go, because we would be compelled to charge more rent.”

“In order to make the same rate of profit,” responded Gail. “Out of all this misery, Market Square Church is reaping a harvest rich enough to build a fifty million dollar cathedral, and I have sufficient disregard for the particular Deity under whom you do business, to feel sure that he would not destroy it by lightning. I want out of here.”

“Frankly, so do I,” admitted Manning; “although I’m ashamed of myself. It’s all right for you, who are young, to be fastidious, but your Daddy Manning is coward enough to want to make his peace with Heaven, after a life which put a few blots on the book.”

She looked at him speculatively for a moment, and then she laughed.

“You know, I don’t believe that, Daddy Manning. You’re an old fraud, who does good by stealth, in order to gain the reputation of having been picturesquely wicked. Tell me why you belong to Market Square Church.”

“Because it’s so respectable,” he twinkled down at her. “When an old sinner has lost every other claim to respectability, he has himself put on the vestry.”

He dropped behind on their way to the door, to surreptitiously slip something, which looked like money, to the man with the roughly hewn countenance, and as he stood talking, the Reverend Smith Boyd came in, not quite breathlessly, but as if he had hurried.

“I knew you were here,” he said, taking Gail’s slender hand in his own; then his eyes turned cold.

“You recognised my pink ribbon bows,” and she laughed up at him frankly. “You haven’t been over to sing lately.”

“No,” he replied, seemingly blunt, because he could not say he had been too busy.

“Why?” this innocently round-eyed.

Even bluntness could not save him here.

“Will you be at home this evening?” he evaded, still with restraint.

“I’ll have our music selected,” and, in the very midst of her brightness, she was stopped by the sudden sombreness in the rector’s eyes.

“Eight o’clock?”

“That will be quite agreeable.”

Simple little conversation; quite trivial indeed, but it had been attended by much shifting thought. To begin with, the rector regretted the necessity of disapproving of a young lady so undeniably attractive. She was a pleasure to the eye and a stimulus to the mind, and always his first impulse when he thought of her was one of pleasure, but in the very moment of taking her hand, he saw again that picture of Gail, clasped in the arms of the impulsive young man from home. That picture had made it distasteful for him to call and sing. He had not been too busy! Another incident flashed back to him. The night of the toboggan party, when she had stood with her face upturned, and the moonlight gleaming on her round white throat. He had trembled, much to his later sorrow, as he fastened the scarf about her warm neck. However, she was the visiting niece of one of his vestrymen, who lived next door to the rectory. She was particularly charming in this outfit of brown, which enhanced so much her rich tints.

Gail jerked her pretty head impatiently. If the Reverend Smith Boyd meant to be as sombre as this, she’d rather he’d stay at home. He was dreadfully gloomy at times; though she was compelled to admit that he was good-looking, in a manly sort of way, and had a glorious voice and a stimulating mind. She invariably recalled him with pleasure, but something about him aggravated her so. Strange about that quick withdrawal of his hand. It was almost rude. He had done the same thing at the toboggan party. He had fastened her scarf, and then he had jerked away his hands as if he were annoyed! However, he was the rector, and her Uncle Jim was a vestryman, and they lived right next door.

“You just escaped a blowing up, Doctor Boyd,” observed “Daddy” Manning, joining them, and his eyes twinkled from one to the other. “Our young friend from the west is harsh with the venerable Market Square Church.”

“Again?” and the Reverend Smith Boyd was gracious enough to smile. “What is the matter with it this time?”

“It is not only commercial, but criminal,” repeated Manning, with a sly smile at Gail, who now wore a little red spot in each cheek.

“In what way?” and the rector turned to her severely.

“The mere fact that your question needs an answer is sufficient indication of the callousness of every one connected with Market Square Church,” she promptly informed him. “That the church should permit a spot like this to exist, when it has the power to obliterate it, is unbelievable; but that it should make money from the condition is infamous!”

The Reverend Smith Boyd’s cold eyes turned green, as he glared at this daring young person. In offending the dignity of Market Square Church she offended his own.

“What would you have us do?” he quietly asked.

“Retire from business,” she informed him, nettled by the covert sneer at her youth and inexperience. She laid aside a new perplexity for future solution. In moments such as this the rector was far from ministerial, and he displayed a quickness to anger quite out of proportion to the apparent cause. “The whole trouble with Market Square Church, and of the churches throughout the world, is that they have no God. The Creator has been reduced to a formula.”

Daddy Manning saved the rector the pain of any answer.

“You’re a religious anarchist,” he charged Gail.

Her face softened.

“By no means,” she replied. “I am a devoted follower of the Divine Spirit, the Divine Will, the Divine Law; but not of the church; for it has forgotten these things.”

“You don’t know what you are saying,” the rector told her.

“That isn’t all you mean,” she retorted. “What you have in mind is that, being a woman, and young, I should be silent. You would not permit thought if you could avoid it, for when people begin to think, religion lives but the church dies; as it is doing to-day.”

Now the Reverend Smith Boyd could be triumphant. There was a curl of sarcasm on his lips.

“Are you quite consistent?” he charged. “You have just been objecting to the prosperity of the church.”

“Financially,” she admitted; “but it is a spiritual bankrupt. Your financial prosperity is a direct sign of your religious decay. Your financial bankruptcy will come later, as it has done in France, as it is doing in Italy, as it will do all over the world. Humanity treats the church with the generosity due a once valuable servant who has out-lived his usefulness.”

“My dear child, humanity can never do without religion,” interposed Daddy Manning.

“Agreed,” said Gail; “but it outgrows them. It outgrew paganism, idolatry, and a score of minor phases in between. Now it is outgrowing the religion of creed, in its progress toward morality. What we need is a new religion.”

“You are blaming the church with a fault which lies in the people,” protested the rector, shocked and disturbed, and yet feeling it his duty to set Gail right. He was ashamed of himself for having been severe with her in his mind. She was less frivolous than he had thought, and what she needed was spiritual instruction. “The people are luke-warm.”

“What else could they be with the watery spiritual gruel which the church provides?” retorted Gail. “You feed us discarded bugaboos, outworn tenets, meaningless forms and ceremonies. All the rest of the world progresses, but the church stands still. Once in a decade some sect patches its creed, and thinks it has been revolutionary, when in fact it has only caught up with a point which was passed by humanity at large, in its advancing intelligence, fifty years before.”

“I am interested in knowing what your particular new religion would be like,” remarked Daddy Manning, his twinkling eyes resting affectionately on her.

“It would be a return to the simple faith in God,” Gail told him reverently. “It is still in the hearts of the people, as it will always be; but they have nowhere to gather together and worship.”

Daddy Manning laughed as he detected that bit of sarcasm.

“According to that we are wasting our new cathedral.”

“Absolutely!” and it struck the rector with pain that Gail had never looked more beautiful than now, with her cheeks flushed and her brown eyes snapping with indignation. “Your cathedral will be a monument, built out of the profits wrung from squalor, to the vanity of your congregation. If I were the dictator of this wonderful city of achievement, I would decree that cathedral never to be built, and Vedder Court to be utterly destroyed!”

“It is perhaps just as well that you are not the dictator of the city.” The young Reverend Smith Boyd gazed down at her from his six feet of serious purpose, with all his previous disapproval intensified. “The history of Market Square Church is rich with instances of its usefulness in both the spiritual and the material world, with evidence of its power for good, with justification for its existence, with reason for its acts. You make the common mistake of judging an entire body from one surface indication. Do you suppose there is no sincerity, no conscience, no consecration in Market Square Church?” His deep, mellow baritone vibrated with the defence of his purpose and that of the institution which he represented. “Why do you suppose our vestrymen, whose time is of enormous value, find a space amid their busy working hours for the affairs of Market Square Church? Why do you suppose the ladies of our guild, who have agreeable pursuits for every hour of the day, give their time to committee and charity work?” He paused for a hesitant moment. “Why do you suppose I am so eager for the building, on American soil, of the most magnificent house of worship in the world?”

Gail’s pretty upper lip curled.

“Personal ambition!” she snapped, and, without waiting to see the pallor which struck his face to stone, she heeled her way out through the mud to her coupé.

CHAPTER X
THE STORM CENTRE OF MAGNETIC ATTRACTION

“Brother Bones,” said Interlocutor Ted Teasdale commandingly, with his knuckles on his right knee and his elbow at the proper angle.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Interlocutor,” replied Willis Cunningham, whose “black-face make-up” seemed marvellously absurd in connection with his brown Vandyke.

“Brother Bones, when does everybody love a storm?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Interlocutor,” admitted Brother Bones Cunningham, touching his kinky wig with the tip of one forefinger. “When does everybody love a storm?”

Interlocutor Ted Teasdale roved his eye over the assemblage, of fifty or more, in his own ballroom, and smiled in a superior fashion. The ebony-faced semicircle of impromptu minstrels, banded together that morning, leaned forward with anticipatory grins. They had heard the joke in rehearsal. It was a corker!

“When it’s a Gail,” he replied, whereat Gail Sargent, at whom everybody looked and laughed, flushed prettily, and the bones and tambos made a flourish, and the Interlocutor announced that the Self Help Glee Club would now sing that entrancing ditty, entitled “Mary Had a Little Calf.”

It was only in the blossom of the evening at Ted Teasdale’s country house, the same being about eleven o’clock, and the dance was still to begin. Lucile Teasdale’s vivid idea for making her house-party notable was to induce their guests to amuse themselves; and their set had depended upon hired entertainers for so long that the idea had all the charm of distinct novelty. There had been an amazingly smart operetta written on the spot by Willis Cunningham, and with musical settings by Arlene Fosland. Rippingly clever thing! “The Tea Room Suffragettes!” Ball afterwards, of course, until four o’clock in the morning. To-night the minstrel show, and a ball; to-morrow night tableaux vivant, and a ball; fancy dress this time, and all costumes to be devised from the materials at hand by the wearer’s own ingenuity. Fine? No end of it! One could always be sure of having a lively time around Lucile and Ted Teasdale and Arly Fosland. Gerald Fosland was at this party. Fine chap, Gerald, and beautifully decent in his attentions to Arly. Pity they were so rotten bored with each other; but there you were! Each should have married a blonde.

Gail Sargent fairly scintillated with enjoyment. She had never attended so brilliant a house-party. Her own set back home had a lot of fun, but this was in some way different. The people were no more clever, but there were more clever people among them; that was it. There had been a wider range from which to pick, which was why, in New York, there were so many circles, and circles within circles.

Gail was sparkling all the time. There was a constant flash of wit, not of a very high order, to be sure, nor exceptionally brilliant, which latter was its chief charm. Some wit has to be taken so very seriously. There were dashes into the brisk, exhilarating winter air, there were lazy breakfasts, where three or four of the girls grouped in one room, there was endless gaiety and laughter, and, above all, oceans and oceans of flirtation. The men whom Lucile and Arly had collected were an especial joy. They had all the accomplished outward symbols of fervour without any of its oppressive insistence. Gail, as an agreeable duty to her new found self, experimented with several of them, and found them most amusing and pleasant, but nothing more disturbing.

Dick Rodley was the most persistent, and, in spite of the fact that he was so flawlessly handsome as to excite ridicule, Gail found herself, by and by, defending him against her own iconoclastic sense of humour. He reached her after the minstrel show, while Houston Van Ploon and Willis Cunningham were still struggling profanely with their burnt cork, and he stole her from under the very eyes of Jack Lariby, while that smitten youth was exchanging wit, at a tremendous loss, with caustic Arly Fosland.

“Have you seen the new century plant in the conservatory?” Dick asked, beaming down at her, his black eyes glowing like coals.

Gail’s eyelids flashed down for an instant, and the corners of her lips twitched. Young Lariby had only been with her five minutes, but she had felt herself ageing in that time.

“I love them,” she avowed, and glancing backward just once, she tiptoed hastily away with the delighted Dick. That young man had looked deep into the eyes of many women, and at last he was weary of being adored. He led Gail straight to the sequestered corner behind the date palms, but it was occupied by Bobby Chalmers and Flo Reynolds. He strolled with Gail to the seat behind the rose screen, but it was fully engaged, and he led the way out toward the geranium alcove.

“I’ve missed you so this evening,” he earnestly confided to her. “I was two hours in the minstrel show. It was forever, Gail!” and he bent his glowing eyes upon her. That was it! His wonderful eyes! They were magnetic, compelling, and one would be dull who could not find a response to the thrill of them.

“Where is the century plant?” He was a tremendously pleasant fellow. When she walked through a crowded room with Dick, she knew, from the looks of admiration, just what people were saying; that they were an extraordinarily handsome couple.

“There is no century plant,” he shamelessly confessed.

“I knew it,” and she laughed.

“I don’t mind admitting that it was a point-blank lie,” he cheerfully told her. “I wanted to get you out here alone, all to myself,” and his voice went down two tones. He did do it so prettily!

“I’ve counted seven couples,” she gaily responded.

He tightened his arm where her hand lay in it, and she left it there.

“You’ve clinched Lucile’s reputation,” he stated. “She always has been famous for picking good ones; but she saved you for the climax.”

“My happy, happy childhood days,” laughed Gail. “The boys used to talk that way on the way home from school.”

“I don’t doubt it,” and Dick smiled appreciatively. “The dullest sort of a boy would find himself saying nice things to you; but I shall stop it.”

“Oh, please don’t!” begged Gail. “You are so delightful at it.”

He pounced on a corner half hidden by a tub of ferns. There was no bench there, but it was at least semi-isolated, and he leaned gracefully against the window-ledge, looking down at her earnestly as she stood, slenderly outlined against the green of the ferns, in her gown of delicate blue sparkling with opalescent flakes.

“That’s just the trouble,” he complained. “I don’t wish you to be aware that I am saying what you call pretty things. I wish, instead, to be effective,” and there was a roughness in his voice which had come for the first time. She was a trifle startled by it, and she lowered her eyes before the steady gaze which he poured down on her. Why, he was in earnest!

“Then take me to Lucile,” she smiled up at him, and strolled in toward the ballroom.

Willis Cunningham met them at the door.

“You promised me the first dance,” he breathlessly informed Gail. He had been walking rapidly.

“Are they ready?” she inquired, stepping a pace away from Dick.

“Well, the musicians are coming in,” evaded Cunningham, tucking her hand in his arm.

“I’ve the second one, remember, Gail,” Dick reminded her, as he glanced around the ballroom for his own partner, but Gail distinctly felt his eyes following her as she walked away with Cunningham.

“I know now of what your profile reminds me,” Cunningham told her; “the Charmeaux ‘Praying Nymph.’ It is the most spiritually beautiful of all the pictures in the Louvre.”

“I wonder which is the stronger emotion in me just now,” she returned; “gratified vanity or curiosity.”

“I hope it’s the latter,” smiled Cunningham. “I recall now a gallery in which there is a very good copy of the Charmeaux canvas, and I’d be delighted to take you.”

“I’ll go with pleasure,” promised Gail, and Cunningham turned to her with a grateful smile.

“I would prefer to show you the original,” he ventured.

“Oh, look at them tuning their drums,” cried Gail, and he thought that she had entirely missed his hint, that the keenest delight in his life would be to lead her through the Louvre, and from thence to a perspective of picture galleries, dazzling with all the hues of the spectrum, and as long as life!

He had other things which he wanted to say, but he calculatingly reserved them for the day of the picture viewing, when he would have her exclusive attention; so, through the dance, he talked of trifles far from his heart. He was a nice chap, too.

Dick Rodley was on hand with the last stroke of the music, to claim her for his dance. By one of those waves of unspoken agreement, Gail was being “rushed.” It was her night, and she enjoyed it to the full. Perhaps the new awakening in Gail, the crystallisation of which she had been forced to become conscious, had something to do with this. Her cheeks, while no more beautiful in their delicacy of colouring, had a certain quality of translucence, which gave her the indefinable effect of glowing from within; her eyes, while no brighter, had changed the manner of their brightness. They had lost something of their sparkle, which had been replaced by a peculiarly enticing half-veiled scintillation, much as if they were smouldering, only to cast off streams of brilliant sparks at the slightest disturbance; while all about her was the vague intangible aura of magnetic attraction which seemed to flutter and to soothe and to call, all in one.

Dick Rodley was the first to know this vague change in her; perhaps because Dick, with all his experience in the social diversion of love-making, was, after all, more spiritual in his physical perceptions. At any rate he hovered near her at every opportunity throughout the evening, and his own eyes, which had the natural trick of glowing, now almost blazed when they met those of Gail. She liked him, and she did not. She was thrown into a flutter of pleasure when he came near her, she enjoyed a clash of wit, and of will, and of snappy mutual attraction; then suddenly she wanted him away from her, only to welcome him eagerly when he came back.

Van Ploon danced with her, danced conscientiously, keeping perfect time to the music, avoiding, with practised adroitness, every possible pocketing, or even hem contacts with surrounding couples, and acquitting himself of lightly turned observations at the expiration of about every seventy seconds. He was aware that Gail was exceptionally pretty to-night, but, if he stopped to analyse it at all, he probably ascribed it to her delicate blue dancing frock with its opalescent flakes, or her coiffure, or something of the sort. He quite approved of her; extraordinarily so. He had never met a girl who approached so near the thousand per cent. grade of perfection by all the blue ribbon points.

It was while she was enjoying her second restful dance with Van Ploon that Gail, swinging with him near the south windows, heard the honk of an auto horn, and a repetition close after, and, by the acceleration of tone, she discerned that the machine was coming up the drive at break-neck speed. Moreover, her delicately attuned musical ear recognised something familiar in the sound of the horn; perhaps tone, perhaps duration, perhaps inflection, more likely a combination of all three. Consequently, she was not at all surprised when, near the conclusion of the dance, she saw Allison standing in the doorway of the ballroom, with his hands in his pockets, watching her with a smile. Her eyes lighted with pleasure, and she nodded gaily to him over Van Ploon’s tall shoulder. When the dance stopped she was on the far side of the room, and was instantly the centre of a buzzing little knot of dancers, from out of which carefree laughter radiated like visible flashes of musical sound. She emerged from the group with the arms of two bright-eyed girls around her waist, and met Allison sturdily breasting the currents which had set towards the conservatory, the drawing-rooms, or the buffet.

“Nobody has saved me a dance,” he complained.

“Nobody expected you until to-morrow,” Gail smilingly returned, introducing him to the girls. “I’ll beg you one of my dances from Ted or somebody.”

She was so obviously slated to entertain Allison during this little intermission, that Van Ploon, following the trio in duty bound, took one of the girls and went away, and her partner led the other one to the music room.

“I’ll have Lucile piece you out a card,” offered Gail, as they strolled naturally across to the little glass enclosed balcony. “I don’t think I can secure you one of Arly’s dances. She’s scandalously popular to-night.”

“One will be enough for me, unless you can steal me some more of your own,” he told her, glancing down at her, from coiffure to blue pointed slippers, with calm appreciation. “You are looking great to-night,” and his gaze came back to rest in her glowing eyes. Her fresh colour had been heightened by the excitement of the evening, but now an added flush swept lightly over her cheeks, and passed.

“I’ll see what I can do,” she speculated, looking at her dance card. “The next three are with total strangers, and of course I can’t touch those,” she laughed. “The fourth one is with Willis Cunningham, and after that is a brief wilderness again. I think one is all you get.”

“I’m lucky even to have that,” declared Allison in content. “The fourth dance down. That will just give me time to punish the buffet. I’m hungry as a bear. I started out here without my dinner.”

They stood at the balcony windows looking out into the wintry night. There was not much to see, not even the lacing of the bare trees against the clouded sky. The snow had gone, and where the light from the windows cut squarely on the ground were bare walks, and cold marble, and dead lawn; all else was blackness; but it was a sufficient landscape for people so intensely concentrated upon themselves.

Her next partner came in search of her presently, and the music struck up, and Allison, nodding to his many acquaintances jovially, for he was in excellent humour in these days of building, and planning, and clearing ground for an entirely new superstructure of life, circled around to the dining room, where he performed savage feats at the buffet. Soon he was out again, standing quietly at the edge of things, and watching Gail with keen pleasure, both when she danced and when, in the intermissions, the gallants of the party gravitated to her like needles to a magnet. Her popularity pleased him, and flattered him. Suddenly he caught sight of Eldridge Babbitt, a middle-aged man who was watching a young woman with the same pleasure Allison was experiencing in the contemplation of Gail.

“Just the man I wanted to see,” announced Allison, making his way to Babbitt. “I have a new freightage proposition for the National Dairy Products Consolidation.”

Babbitt brightened visibly. He had been missing something keenly these past two days, and now all at once he realised what it was; business.

“I can’t see any possible new angle,” returned Babbitt cautiously, and with a backward glance at the dashing young Mrs. Babbitt. He headed instinctively for the library.

Laughingly Gail finished her third dance down. She had enjoyed several sparkling encounters in passing with Dick Rodley, and she was buoyantly exhilarated as she started to stroll from the floor with her partner. She had wanted to find cherub-cheeked Marion Kenneth, and together they walked through the conservatory, and the dining room, and the deserted billiard room, with its bright light on the green cloth and all the rest of the room in dimness. There was a narrow space at one point between the chairs and the table, and it unexpectedly wedged them into close contact. With a sharp intake of his breath, the fellow, a ruddy-faced, thick-necked, full-lipped young man who had followed her with his eyes all evening, suddenly turned, and caught her in his embrace, and, holding back her head in the hollow of his arm, kissed her; a new kiss to her, and horrible!

Suddenly he released her, and stepped back abruptly, filled with remorse.

“Forgive me, Miss Sargent,” he begged.

Gail nodded her numb acceptance of the apology, and turning, hurried out of the side door to the veranda. Her knees were trembling, but the fresh, cold air steadied her, and she walked the full length of the wide porch, trying instinctively to forget the sickening humiliation. As she came to the corner of the house, the sharp winter wind tore at her, smote her throat, clutched at her bare shoulders, and stopped her with a sharp physical command. She drew her gauzy little dancing scarf around her, and held it tightly knotted at her throat, and edged closer to the house. She was near a window, and, advancing a step, she looked in. It was the library, and Allison sat there, so clean and wholesome looking, with his pink shaven face and his white evening waistcoat, and his dark hair beginning to sprinkle with grey at the temples. He was so sturdy and so strong and so dependable looking, as he sat earnestly talking with Babbitt. Allison said something, and they both smiled; then Babbitt said something and they both threw back their heads and laughed, while Allison, with one hand in his pocket, waved his other hand over a memorandum pad which lay between them. Gail hurried to the front door and rang the bell.

“Hello, Gail,” greeted the cheery voice of Allison, as she came in. “My dance next, isn’t it?”

His voice was so good, so comforting, so reassuring.

“I think so,” she replied, standing hesitantly in the doorway, and thankful that the lights were canopied in this room.

Allison drew the memorandum pad toward him, and rose.

She was glad to be alone, to rescue herself from the whirl of anger and indignation and humiliation which had swept around her

“By the way, there’s one thing I forgot to tell you, Babbitt, and it’s rather important.” He hesitated and glanced toward the door. “You’ll excuse me just half a minute, won’t you, Gail?”

She had noticed that assumption of intimate understanding in him before, and she had secretly admired it. Now it was a comfort and a joy.

“Surely,” she granted, and passed on in to the library alcove, a sheltered nook where she was glad to be alone, to rescue herself from the whirl of anger, and indignation, and humiliation—above all, humiliation!—which had swept around her. What had she done to bring this despicable experience upon herself? What evil thing had there been in her to summons forth this ugly spectre? She had groped almost deliberately for that other polarity which should complete her, but this painful moment was not one of the things for which she had sought. She could not know, but she had passed one of the inevitable milestones. The very crystallisation which had brightened and whetted her to a keen zest in her natural destiny, had attracted this fellow, inevitably. Her face was hot and cold by turns, and she was almost on the point of crying, in spite of her constantly reiterated self-admonishment that she must control herself here, when Allison came to the door of the alcove.

“All right, Gail,” he said laconically.

She felt suddenly weary, but she rose and joined him. When she slipped her hand in his arm, strong, and warm, and pulsing, she was aware of a thrill from it, but the thrill was just restfulness.

“You look a little tired,” judged the practical Allison, as they strolled, side by side, into the hall, and he patted the slender hand which lay on his arm.

“Not very,” she lightly replied, and unconsciously she snuggled her hand more comfortably into its resting place. A little sigh escaped her lips, deep-drawn and fluttering. It was a sigh of content.

CHAPTER XI
“GENTLEMEN, THERE IS YOUR EMPIRE!”

The seven quiet gentlemen who sat with Allison at his library table, followed the concluding flourish of his hand toward the map on the wall, and either nodded or blinked appreciatively. The red line on his map was complete now, a broad, straight line from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and to it were added, on either side, irregular, angling red lines like the legs of a centipede, the feeders of the various systems which were under control of the new Atlantic-Pacific Railroad.

“That’s a brilliant piece of engineering, Allison,” observed huge Richard Haverman, by way of pleasant comment, and he glanced admiringly at Allison after his eye had roved around the little company of notables. The feat of bringing these seven men together at a specific hour, was greater than having consolidated the brilliant new Atlantic-Pacific Railroad.

“Let’s get to the details,” barked a voice with the volume of a St. Bernard. It came from Arthur Grandin, the head of the Union Fuel Company, which controlled all the wood and coal in the United States, and all the oil in the world. His bald spot came exactly on a level with the back of his chair, and he wore a fierce moustache.

“I’m putting in the Atlantic-Pacific as my share of the pool, gentlemen,” explained Allison. “My project, as I have told you, is to make this the main trunk, the vertebræ as it were, of the International Transportation Company. I have consolidated with the A.-P. the Municipal Transportation Company, and I have put my entire fortune in it, to lay it on the table absolutely unencumbered.”

He threw down the Atlantic-Pacific Railroad and the Municipal Transportation Company in the form of a one sheet typewritten paper.

“We’d better appoint some one to look after the legal end of things,” suggested the towering Haverman, whose careless, lounging attitude contrasted oddly with his dignified long beard.

“I’ll take care of it,” said W. T. Chisholm, of the Majestic Trust Company, and drawing the statement in front of him, he set a paperweight on it.

“The first step is not one of incorporation,” went on Allison. “Before that is done there must be but one railroad system in the United States.”

Smooth-shaven old Joseph G. Clark nodded his head. There was but one cereal company in the United States, and the Standard, in the beginning, had been the smallest. Two of the heads of rival concerns were now in Clark’s employ, one was a pauper, and three were dead. He disliked the pauper.

Robert E. Taylor, of the American Textiles Company, a man who had quite disproved the theory that constructive business genius was confined to the North, smoothed his grey moustache reflectively, with the tip of his middle finger, all the way out to its long point.

“I can see where you will tear up the east and west traffic situation to a considerable extent,” he thoughtfully commented; “but without the important north and south main trunks you can not make a tight web.”

Allison went over to his wall map, with a step in which there was the spring of a boy. A. L. Vance, of the United States Supplies Company, which controlled beef, sugar, and practically all other food products, except those mighty necessities under the sways of the Standard Cereal Company and Eldridge Babbitt’s National Dairy Products Consolidation, studied the buoyant Allison with a puzzled expression. He had seen Allison grow to care-burdened manhood, and suddenly Ed seemed twenty years younger. Only Eldridge Babbitt knew the secret of this miraculous rejuvenescence. Babbitt had married late in life; a beautiful young woman!

“The key to the north and south situation is here,” said Allison, and he drew a firm, swift, green line down across the United States, branching at each end. “George Dalrymple will be here in half an hour, and by that time I trust we may come to some agreement.”

“It depends on what you want,” boomed Arthur Grandin, who, sitting beside the immense Haverman, looked as if that giant had shrunk him by his mere proximity.

“Freight, to begin with,” stated Allison, resuming his place at the head of the table, but not his seat. “You gentlemen represent the largest freightage interests in the United States. You all know your relative products, and yet, in order to grasp this situation completely, I wish to enumerate them. Babbitt’s National Dairy Products Consolidation can swing the shipment of every ounce of butter, cream, cheese, eggs and poultry handled in this country; Clark’s Standard Cereal Company, wheat, corn, oats, rice, barley, malt, flour, every ounce of breadstuffs or cereal goods, grown on American soil; Haverman, the Amalgamated Metals Constructive Company, every pound of iron, lead, and copper, and every ton of ore, from the moment it leaves the ground until it appears as an iron web in a city sky or spans a river; Grandin, the Union Fuel Company, coal and wood, from Alaska to Pennsylvania, with oil and all its enormous by-products; Taylor, the American Textiles Company, wool, cotton, flax, the raw and finished material of every thread of clothing we wear, or any other textile fabric we use except silk; Vance, the United States Supplies Company, meat, sugar, fruit, the main blood and sinew builders of the country. Gentlemen, give me the freightage controlled by your six companies, and I’ll toss the rest of the country’s freightage to a beggar.”

“You forgot Chisholm,” Babbitt reminded him, and Banker Chisholm’s white mutton chops turned pink from the appreciation which glowed in his ruddy-veined face.

“Allison was quite right,” returned big Haverman with a dry smile. “The freightage income on money is an item scarcely worth considering.”

“Give the Atlantic-Pacific this freight, and, inside of two years, the entire business of the United States, with all its ramifications, will be merged in one management, and that management ours. We shall not need to absorb, nor purchase, a single railroad until it is bankrupt.”

“Sensible idea, Allison,” approved Clark, of the Standard Cereal Company. “It’s a logical proposition which I had in mind years ago.”

“Allison’s stroke of genius, it seems to me, consists in getting us together,” smiled big Haverman, hanging his arm over the back of his chair.

Banker Chisholm leaned forward on the table, and stroked his round chin reflectively. “There would be some disorganisation, and perhaps financial disorder, in the first two years,” he considered; “but the railroads are already harassed too much by the government to thrive under competition, and, in the end, I believe this proposed centralisation would be the best thing for the interests of the country”; wherein Chisholm displayed that he was a vestryman of Market Square Church wherever he went.

“What is your proposition?” asked Grandin, who, because of the self-assertion necessitated by his diminutive size, seemed pompous, but was not. No pompous man could have merged the wood, coal, and oil interests, and, having merged them, swung them over his own shoulder.

Allison’s answer consisted of one word.

“Consolidation,” he said.

There was a moment of silence, while these men absorbed that simple idea, and glanced speculatively, not at Allison, but at each other. They were kings, these heads of mighty corporations, whose emissaries carried their sovereignties into the furthest corners of the earth. Like friendly kings, they had helped each other in the protection of their several domains; but this was another matter.

“That’s a large proposition, Ed,” stated Vance, very thoughtfully. All sense of levity had gone from this meeting. They had come, as they thought, to promote a large mutual interest, but not to weld a Frankenstein. “I did not understand your project to be so comprehensive. I fancied your idea to be that the various companies represented here, with Chisholm as financial controller, should take a mutual interest in the support of the Atlantic-Pacific Railroad, for the purpose of consolidating the railroad interests of the country under one management, thereby serving our own transportation needs.”

“Very well put, Vance,” approved Taylor, smoothing his pointed moustache.

“That is a mere logical development of the railroad situation,” returned Allison. “If I had not cemented this direct route, some one would have made the consolidation you mention within ten years, for the entire railroad situation has been disorganised since the death of three big men in that field; and the scattered holdings would be, and are, an easy prey for any one vitally interested enough to invade the industry. I have no such minor proposition in mind. I propose, with the Atlantic-Pacific as a nucleus, to, first, as I have said, bring the financial terminals of every mile of railroad in the United States into one central office. With this I then propose to combine the National Dairy Products Consolidation, the Standard Cereal Company, the Amalgamated Metals Constructive Company, the Union Fuel, American Textiles, the United States Supplies, and the stupendous financial interests swayed by the banks tributary to the Majestic Trust Company. I propose to weld these gigantic concerns into one corporation, which shall be the mightiest organisation the world has ever known. Beginning with the control of transportation, it will control all food, all apparel, all construction materials, all fuel. From the shoes on his feet to the roof over his head, every man in the United States of America, from labourer to president, shall pay tribute to the International Transportation Company. Gentlemen, if I have dreamed big, it is because I have dealt with men who deal only in large dreams. What I propose is an empire greater than that ever swayed by any monarch in history. We eight men, who are here in this room, can build that empire with a scratch of a pen, and can hold it against the assaults of the world!”

His voice rang as he finished, and Babbitt looked at him in wonder. Allison had always been a strong man, but now, in this second youth, he was an Anteus springing fresh from the earth. There was a moment’s lull, and then a nasal voice drawled into the silence.

“Allison;” it was the voice of old Joseph G. Clark, who had built the Standard Cereal Company out of one wheat elevator; “who is to be the monarch of your new empire?”

For just a moment Allison looked about him. Vastly different as these men were, from the full-bearded Haverman to the smooth-shaven old Joseph G. Clark, there was some one expression which was the same in every man, and that expression was mastery. These men, by the sheer force of their personality, by the sheer dominance of their wills, by the sheer virility of their purposes, by the sheer dogged persistence which balks at no obstacle and hesitates at no foe, had fought and strangled and throttled their way to the top, until they stood head and shoulders above all the strong men of their respective domains, safe from protest or dispute of sovereignty, because none had risen strong enough to do them battle. They were the undefeated champions of their classes, and the life of every man in that group was an epic! Who was to be monarch of the new empire? Allison answered that question as simply as he had the others.

“The best man,” he said.

There had been seven big men in America. Now there were eight. They all recognised that.

“Of course,” went on Allison, “my proposition does not assume that any man here will begin by relinquishing control of his own particular branch of the International Transportation Company; sugar, beef, iron, steel, oil, and the other commodities will all be under their present handling; but each branch will so support and benefit the other that the position of the consolidation itself will be impregnable against competition or the assaults of government. The advantages of control, collection, and distribution, are so vast that they far outweigh any possible question of personal aggrandisement.”

“Don’t hedge, Allison,” barked Arthur Grandin. “You expressed it right in the first place. You’re putting it up to us to step out of the local championship class, and contend for the big belt.”

“The prize isn’t big enough,” pronounced W. T. Chisholm, as if he had decided for them all. As befitted his calling, he was slower minded than the rest. There are few quick turns in banking.

“Not big enough?” repeated Allison. “Not big enough, when the Union Fuel Company already supplies every candle which goes into the Soudan, runs the pumps on the Nile and the motor boats on the Yang-Tse-Kyang, supplies the oil for the lubrication of the car of Juggernaut, and works the propeller of every aeroplane? Not big enough, when already the organisations represented here have driven their industries into every quarter of the earth? What shall you say when we join to our nucleus the great steamship lines and the foreign railroads? Not big enough? Gentlemen, look here!” He strode over to the big globe. From New York to San Francisco a red line had already been traced. Now he took a pencil in his hand, and placing the point at New York, gave the globe a whirl, girding it completely. “Gentlemen, there is your empire!”

Again the nasal voice of old Joseph G. Clark drawled into the silence.

“I suggest that we discuss in detail the conditions of the consolidation,” he remarked.

The bell of Allison’s house phone rang.

“Mr. Dalrymple, sir,” said the voice of Ephraim.

“Very well,” replied Allison. “Show him into the study. Babbitt, will you read to the gentlemen this skeleton plan of organisation? If you’ll excuse me, I’ll be back in five minutes.”

“Dalrymple?” inquired Taylor.

“Yes,” answered Allison abstractedly, and went into the study.

He and Dalrymple looked at each other silently for a moment, with the old enmity shining between them. Dalrymple, a man five years Allison’s senior, a brisk speaking man with a protruding jaw and deep-set grey eyes, had done more than any other one human being to develop the transportation systems of New York, but his gift had been in construction, in creation, whereas Allison’s had been in combination; and Dalrymple had gone into the railroad business.

“Dalrymple, I’m going to give you a chance,” said Allison briskly. “I want the Gulf and Great Lakes Railroad system.”

Dalrymple had produced a cigar while he waited for Allison, and now he lit it. He sat on the corner of the study table and surveyed Allison critically.

“I don’t doubt it,” he replied. “The system is almost completed.”

“I’ll accept a fair offer for your controlling interest,” went on Allison.

“And if I won’t sell?”

“Then I’ll jump on you to-morrow in the stock exchange, and take it away from you.”

Dalrymple smiled.

“You can’t do it. I own my controlling interest outright, and no stock gamblings on the board of trade can affect either a share of my stock or the earning capacity of my railroad. When you drove me out of the traction field, I took advantage of my experience and entrenched myself. Go on and gamble.”

“I wish you wouldn’t take that attitude,” returned Allison, troubled. “It looks to you as if I were pursuing you because of that old quarrel; but I want you to know that I’m not vindictive.”

“I don’t think you are,” replied Dalrymple, with infinite contempt. “You’re just a damned hog.”

A hot flush swept over Allison’s face, but it was gone in an instant.

“It happens that I need the new Gulf and Great Lakes system,” he went on, in a perfectly level voice; “and I prefer to buy it from you at a fair price.”

Dalrymple put on his hat.

“It isn’t for sale,” he stated.

“Just a minute, Dalrymple,” interposed Allison. “I want to show you something. Look in here,” and he opened the library door.

Dalrymple stepped to the opening and saw, not merely seven men, middle-aged and past, sitting around a library table, but practically all the freightable necessities of the United States and practically all its money, a power against which his many million dollar railroad system was of no more opposition than a toy train.

“—the transportation department to be governed by a council composed of the representatives of the various other departments herein mentioned,” droned on the voice of Babbitt.

The representatives of the various other departments therein mentioned were bent in concentrated attention on every sentence, and phrase, and word, and syllable of that important document, not omitting to pay important attention to the pauses which answered for commas; and none looked up. Dalrymple closed the door gently.

“Now will you sell?” inquired Allison.

For a moment the two men looked into each other’s eyes, while the old enmity, begun while they were still in the womb of time, lay chill between them. At one instant, Dalrymple, whose jaw muscles were working convulsively, half raised his hands, as if he were minded to fall on Allison and strangle him; and it was not the fact that Allison was probably the stronger man which restrained him, but a bigger pride.

“No,” he said, again with that infinite contempt in his tone. “Break me.”

“All right,” accepted Allison cheerfully, and even with relief; for his way was now free to pursue its normal course. He crossed to the door which opened into the hall, and politely bowed Dalrymple into the guidance of old Ephraim.

“Dalrymple won’t sell,” he reported, when he rejoined his fellow members of the International Transportation Company.

Joseph G. Clark looked up from a set of jotted memoranda which he had been nonchalantly setting down during the reading.

“We’ll pick it up in the stock market,” he carelessly suggested.

“Can’t,” replied Allison, with equal carelessness. “He’s entrenched with solid control, and I imagine he doesn’t owe a dollar.”

Chisholm, with his fingers in his white mutton chops, was studying clean-shaven old Clark’s memoranda.

“A panic will be necessary, anyhow,” he observed. “We’ll acquire the road then.”

CHAPTER XII
GAIL SOLVES THE PROBLEM OF VEDDER COURT

The Reverend Smith Boyd, rector of the richest church in the world, dropped his last collar button on the floor, and looked distinctly annoyed. The collar button rolled under his mahogany highboy, and concealed itself carefully behind one of the legs. The Reverend Smith Boyd, there being none to see, laid aside his high dignity, and got down on his knees, though not for any clerical purpose. With his suspenders hanging down his back, he sprawled his long arms under the highboy in all directions, while his face grew red; and the little collar button, snuggled carefully out of sight behind the furthest leg, just shone and shone. The rector, the ticking of whose dressing-room clock admonished him that the precious moments were passing never to return again, twisted his neck, and bent his head sidewise, and inserted it under the highboy, one ear scraping the rug and the other the bottom of the lowest drawer. No collar button. He withdrew his neck, and twisted his head in the opposite direction, and inserted his head again under the highboy, so that the ear which had scraped the carpet now scraped the bottom of the drawer, whereat the little collar button shone so brightly that the rector’s bulging eye caught the glint of it. His hand swung round, at the end of a long arm, and captured it before it could hide any further, then the young rector withdrew his throbbing head and started to raise up, and bumped the back of his head with a crack on the bottom of an open drawer, near enough to the top to give him a good long sweep for momentum. This mishap being just one degree beyond the point to which the Reverend Smith Boyd had been consecrated, he ejaculated as follows:—

No, it is not respectful, nor proper, nor charitable, to set down what the Reverend Smith Boyd, in that stress, ejaculated; but a beautiful, grey-haired lady, beautiful with the sweetness of content and the happiness of gratified pride and the kindliness of humour, who had paused at the Reverend Smith Boyd’s open door to inquire how soon he would be down to dinner, hastily covered her mouth with her hand, and moved away from the door, with moist blue eyes, around which twinkled a dozen tiny wrinkles born of much smiling.

When the dignified young rector came down to dinner, fully clothed and apparently in his right mind, his mother, who was the beautiful grey-haired lady with the twinkling blue eyes, looked across the table and smiled indulgently at his disguise; for he was not a grown-up, tall, broad-shouldered man of thirty-two at all. In reality he was a shock-headed, slightly freckled urchin of nine or ten, by the name of “Smitty” on the town commons, and “Tod” at home.

“Aren’t you becoming a trifle irritable of late, Tod?” she inquired with solicitude, willfully suppressing a smile which flashed up in her as she remembered that ejaculation. It was shocking in a minister, of course, but she had ever contended that ministers were, and should be, made of clay; and clay is friable.

“Yes, mother, I believe I am,” confessed the Reverend Smith Boyd, considering the matter with serious impartiality.

“You are not ill in any way?”

“Not at all,” he hastily assured her.

“Your cold is all gone?”

“Entirely. As a matter of fact, mother,” and he smiled, “I don’t think I had one.”

“If you hadn’t drank that tea, and taken the mustard foot bath, and wrapped the flannel around your throat, it might have been a severe one,” his mother complacently replied. “You haven’t been studying too much?”

“No,” and the slightest flicker of impatience twitched his brows.

“You’ve no headache?” and the tone was as level as if she had not seen that flicker.

“No, mother.”

“Do you sleep well?”

The Reverend Smith Boyd took a drink of water. His hand trembled slightly.

“Excellently.”

Mrs. Boyd surveyed her son with a practised eye.

“I think your appetite’s dropping off a little,” she commented, and then she was shrewdly silent, though the twinkles of humour came back to her eyes by and by. “I don’t think you take enough social diversion,” she finally advised him. “You should go out more. You should ride, walk, but always in the company of young and agreeable people. Because you are a rector is no reason for you to spend your spare time in gloomy solitude, as you have been doing for the past week.”

The Reverend Smith Boyd would have liked to state that he had been very busy, but he had a conscience, which was a nuisance to him. He had spent most of his spare time up in his study, with his chin in his hand.

“You are quite right, mother,” he sombrely confessed, and swallowed two spoonfuls of his soup. It was excellent soup, but, after taking a bite of a wafer, he laid his spoon on the edge of the plate.

“I think I’ll drive you out of the house, Tod,” Mrs. Boyd decided, in the same tones she had used to employ when she had sent him to bed. “I think I’ll send you over to Sargent’s to-night, to sing with Gail.”

The rector of the richest church in the world flushed a trifle, and looked at the barley in the bottom of his soup. His mother regarded him quietly, and the twinkles went out of her eyes. She had been bound to get at the bottom of his irritability, and now she had arrived at it.

“I would prefer not to go,” he told her stiffly, and the eyes which he lifted to her were coldly green.

“Why?”

Again that slight twitch of impatience in his brows, then he suppressed a sigh. The catechism was on the way, and he might just as well answer up promptly.

“I do not approve of Miss Sargent.”

For just one second the rector’s mother felt an impulse to shake Tod Boyd. Gail Sargent was a young lady of whom any young man might approve—and what was the matter with Tod? She was beginning to be humiliated by the fact that, at thirty-two, he had not lost his head and made a fool of himself, to the point of tight shoes and poetry, over a girl.

“Why?” and the voice of Mrs. Boyd was not cold as she had meant it to be. She had suddenly felt some tug of sympathy for Tod.

“Well, for one thing, she has a most disagreeable lack of reverence,” he stated.

“Reverence?” and Mrs. Boyd knitted her brows. “I don’t believe you quite understand her. She has the most beautifully simple religious faith that I have ever seen, Tod.”

The Reverend Smith Boyd watched his soup disappearing, as if it were some curious moving object to which his attention had just been called.

“Miss Sargent claims to have a new religion,” he observed. “She has said most unkind things about the Church as an institution, and about Market Square Church in particular. She says that it is a strictly commercial institution, and that its motive in desiring to build the new cathedral is vanity.”

He omitted to mention Gail’s further charge that his own motive in desiring the new cathedral was personal ambition. Candour did not compel that admission. It did not become him to act from piqued personal pride.

Mrs. Boyd studied him as he gazed sombrely at his fish, and the twinkles once more returned to her eyes, as she made up her mind to cure Tod’s irritability.

“I am ashamed of you,” she told her son. “This girl is scarcely twenty. If I remember rightly, and I’m sure that I do, you came to me, at about twenty, and confessed to a logical disbelief in the theory of creation, which included, of course, a disbelief in the Creator. You were an infidel, an atheist. You were going to relinquish your studies, and give up all thought of the Church.”

The deep red of the Reverend Smith Boyd’s face testified to the truth of this cruel charge, and he pushed back his fish permanently.

“I most humbly confess,” he stated, and indeed he had writhed in spirit many times over that remembrance. “However, mother, I have since discovered that to be a transitional stage through which every theological student passes.”

“Yet you won’t allow it to a girl,” charged Mrs. Boyd, with the severity which she could much better have expressed with a laugh. “When you discover that this young lady, who seems to be in every way delightful, is so misled as to criticise the motives of Market Square Church, you withdraw into your dignity, with the privilege of a layman, and announce that ‘you do not approve of her.’ What she needs, Tod, is religious instruction.”

She had carefully ironed out the tiny little wrinkles around her blue eyes by the time her son looked up from the profound cogitation into which this reproof had thrown him.

“Mother, I have been wrong,” he admitted, and he seemed ever so much brighter for the confession. He drew his fish towards him and ate it.

Later the Reverend Smith Boyd presented himself at James Sargent’s house, with a new light shining in his breast; and he had blue eyes. He had come to show Gail the way and the light. If she had doubts, and lack of faith, and flippant irreverence, it was his duty to be patient with her, for this was the fault of youth. He had been youthful himself.

Gail’s eyelids dropped and the corners of her lips twitched when the Reverend Smith Boyd’s name was brought up to her, but she did her hair in another way, high on her head instead of low on her neck, and then she went down, bewildering in her simple little dark blue velvet cut round at the neck.

“I am so glad your cold is better,” she greeted him, smiling as pleasantly as if their last meeting had been a most joyous occasion.

“I don’t think I had a cold,” laughed the young rector, also as happily mannered as if their last meeting had been a cheerful one. “I sneezed twice, I believe, and mother immediately gave me a course of doctoring which no cold could resist.”

“I was afraid that your voice was out,” remarked Gail, in a tone suggestive of the fact that that would be a tragedy indeed; and she began hauling forth music. “You haven’t been over for so long.”

The Reverend Smith Boyd coloured. At times the way of spiritual instruction was quite difficult. Nevertheless, he had a duty to perform. Mechanically he had taken his place at the piano, standing straight and tall, and his blue eyes softened as they automatically fell on the piece of music she had opened. Of course it was their favourite, the one in which their voices had soared in the most perfect unison. Gail glanced up at him as she brushed a purely imaginary fleck of dust from the keys. For an instant the brown eyes and the blue ones met. He was a tremendously nice fellow, after all. But what was worrying him?

“Before we sing I should like to take up graver matters,” he began, feeling at a tremendous disadvantage in the presence of the music. To obviate this, he drew up a chair, and sat facing her. “I have called this evening in the capacity of your temporary rector.”

Gail’s eyelids had a tendency to flicker down, but she restrained them. She was adorable when she looked prim that way. Her lips were like a rosebud. The Reverend Smith Boyd himself thought of the simile, and cast it behind him.

“You are most kind,” she told him, suppressing the imps and demons which struggled to pop into her eyes.

“I have been greatly disturbed by the length to which your unbelief has apparently gone,” the young rector went on, and having plunged into this opening he began to breathe more freely. This was familiar ground. “I am willing to admit, to one of your intelligence, that there are certain articles of the creed, and certain tenets of the Church, which humanity has outgrown, as a child outgrows its fear of the dark.”

Gail rested a palm on the edge of the bench behind her, and leaned back facing him, supported on one beautifully modelled arm. Her face had set seriously now.

“However,” went on the rector, “it is the habit and the privilege of youth to run to extremes. Sweeping doubt takes the place of reasonable criticism, and the much which is good is condemned alike with the little which has grown useless.”

He paused to give Gail a chance for reply, but that straight-eyed young lady had nothing to say, at this juncture.

“I do not expect to be able to remove the spiritual errors, which I am compelled to judge that you have accumulated, by any other means than patient logic,” he resumed. “May I discuss these matters with you?” His voice was grave and serious, and full of earnest sincerity, and the musical quality alone of it made patient logical discussion seem attractive.

“If you like,” she assented, smiling at him with wileful and wilful deception. The wicked thought had occurred to her that it might be her own duty to broaden his spiritual understanding.

“Thank you,” he accepted gravely. “If you will give me an hour or so each week, I shall be very happy.”

“I am nearly always at home on Tuesday and Friday evenings,” suggested Gail. “Scarcely any one calls before eight thirty, and we have dinner quite early on those evenings.” She began to be sincerely interested in the project. She had never given herself time to quite exactly define her own attitude towards theology as distinct from religion, and she felt that she should do it, if for no other reason than to avoid making impulsive over-statements. The Reverend Smith Boyd would help her to look squarely into her own mind and her own soul, for he had a very active intelligence, and was, moreover, the most humanly forceful cleric she had ever met. Besides, they could always finish by singing.

“I shall make arrangements to be over as early as you will permit,” declared the rector, warmly aglow with the idea. “We shall begin with the very beginnings of things, and, step by step, develop, I hope, a logical justification of the vast spiritual revolution which has conquered the world.”

“I should like nothing better,” mused Gail, and since the Reverend Smith Boyd rose, and stood behind her and filled his lungs, she turned to the piano and struck a preliminary chord, which she trailed off into a tinkling little run, by way of friendly greeting to the piano.

“We shall begin with the creation,” pursued the rector, dwelling, with pleasure, on the idea of a thorough progress through the mazes of religious growth. There were certain vague points which he wanted to clear up for himself.

“And wind up with Vedder Court.” She had not meant to say that. It just popped into her mind, and popped off the end of her tongue.

“Even that will be taken up in its due logical sequence,” and the Reverend Smith Boyd prided himself on having already displayed the patience which he had come expressly to exercise.

Gail was immediately aware that he was exercising patience. He had reproved her, nevertheless, and quite coldly, for having violated the tacit agreement to take up the different phases of their weighty topic only “in their due logic sequence.” The rector, in this emergency, would have found no answer which would stand the test, but Gail had the immense advantage of femininity.

“It altogether depends at which end we start our sequence,” she sweetly reminded him. “My own impression is that we should begin at Vedder Court and work back to the creation. Vedder Court needs immediate attention.”

That was quite sufficient. When Allison called, twenty minutes later, they were at it hammer and tongs. There was a bright red spot in each of Gail’s cheeks, and the Reverend Smith Boyd’s cold eyes were distinctly green! Allison had been duly announced, but the combatants merely glanced at him, and finished the few remarks upon which they were, at the moment, engaged. He had been studying the tableau with the interest of a connoisseur, and he had devoted his more earnest attention to the Reverend Smith Boyd.

“So glad to see you,” said Gail conventionally, rising and offering him her hand. If there was that strange thrill in his clasp, she was not aware of it.

“I only ran in to see if you’d like to take a private car trip in the new subway before it is opened,” offered Allison, turning to shake hands with the Reverend Smith Boyd. “Will you join us, Doctor?”

For some reason a new sort of jangle had come into the room, and it affected the three of them. Allison was the only one who did not notice that he had taken Gail’s acceptance for granted.

“You might tell us when,” she observed, transferring the flame of her eyes from the rector to Allison. “I may have conflicting engagements.”

“No, you won’t,” Allison cheerfully informed her; “because it will be at any hour you set.”

“Oh,” was the weak response, and, recognising that she was fairly beaten, her white teeth flashed at him in a smile of humour. “Suppose we say ten o’clock to-morrow morning.”

“I am free at that hour,” stated Doctor Boyd, in answer to a glance of inquiry from Allison. He felt it his duty to keep in touch with public improvements. Also, beneath his duty lay a keen pleasure in the task.

“You’ll be very much interested, I think,” and Allison glowed with the ever-present pride of achievement, then he suddenly grinned. “The new subway stops at the edge of Vedder Court, waiting.”

There was another little pause of embarrassment, in which Gail and the Reverend Smith Boyd were very careful not to glance at each other. Unfortunately, however, the Reverend Smith Boyd was luckless enough to automatically, and without conscious mental process, fold the sheet of music which had long since been placed on the piano.

“Why stop at the edge of Vedder Court?” inquired Gail, with a nervous little jerk, much as if the words had been jolted out of her by the awkward slam of the music rack, which had succeeded the removal of the song. “Why not go straight on through, and demolish Vedder Court? It is a scandal and a disgrace to civilisation, and to the city, as well as to its present proprietors! Vedder Court should be annihilated, torn down, burned up, swept from the face of the earth! The board of health should condemn it as unsanitary, the building commission should condemn it as unsafe, the department of public morals should condemn it as unwholesome!”

The Reverend Smith Boyd had been engaged in a strong wrestle within himself, but the spirit finally conquered the flesh, and he held his tongue. He remembered that Gail was young, and youth was prone to extravagant impulse. His spirit of forbearance came so strongly to his aid that he was even able to acknowledge how beautiful she was when she was stiffened.

Allison had been viewing her with mingled admiration and respect.

“By George, that’s a great idea,” he thoughtfully commented. “Gail, I think I’ll tear down Vedder Court for you!”

CHAPTER XIII
THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST

A short, thick old man, grey-bearded and puff-eyed and loaded with enormous jewels, met Gail, Lucile and Arly, Ted Teasdale and the Reverend Smith Boyd, at the foot of the subway stairs, and introduced himself with smiling ease as Tim Corman, beaming with much pride in his wide-spread fame.

“Mr. Allison sent me to meet you,” he stated, with a bow on which he justly prided himself. “Allison played a low trick on me, ladies,” and he gazed on them in turns with a jovial familiarity, which, in another, they might have resented. “From the description he gave me, I was looking for the most beautiful young lady in the world, and here there’s three of you.” His eyes swelled completely shut when he laughed. “So you’ll have to help me out. Which one of you is Miss Sargent?”

“The young lady who answers the description,” smiled Arly, delighted with Tim Corman, and she indicated Gail.

“Mr. Allison couldn’t be here,” explained Tim, leading the way to the brightly lighted private car. “We’re to pick him up at Hoadley Park. Miss Sargent, as hostess of the party, is to have charge of everything.”

The side doors slid open as they approached, and they entered the carpeted and draped car, furnished with wicker chairs and a well-stocked buffet. In the forward compartment were three responsible looking men and a motorman, and one of the responsibles, a fat gentleman who did not seem to care how his clothes looked, leaned into the parlour.

“All ready?” he inquired, with an air of concealing a secret impression that women had no business here.

Tim Corman, who had carefully seen to it that he had a seat between Gail and Arly, touched Gail on the glove.

“Ready, thank you,” she replied, glancing brightly at the loosely arrayed fat man, and she could see that immediately a portion of that secret impression was removed.

With an easy glide, which increased with surprising rapidity into express speed, the car slid into the long, glistening tunnel, still moist with the odours of building.

“This is the most stunningly exclusive thing in the world!” exclaimed Lucile Teasdale. “A private subway!”

The Reverend Smith Boyd bent forward. All the way down to the subway entrance he had enjoyed the reversal to that golden age where no one says anything and everybody laughs at it.

“To my mind that is not the greatest novelty,” he observed. “The most enjoyable part of the journey so far has been getting into the subway without paying a nickel.” He glanced over at Gail as he spoke, but only Arly, Lucile and Ted laughed. Tim Corman had adroitly blocked Gail into a corner, and was holding her attention.

“Ed Allison’s one of the smartest boys in New York,” he enthusiastically declared. “Did you ever see anybody as busy as he is?”

“He seems to be a very energetic man,” Gail assented, with a sudden remembrance of how busy Allison had always been.

“Gets anything he goes after,” Tim informed her, and screwed one of his many-puffed eyes into a wink; at which significant action Gail looked out at the motorman. “Never tells his plans to anybody, nor what he wants. Just goes and gets it.”

“That’s a successful way, I should judge,” she responded, now able to see the humour of Tim Corman’s volunteer mission, but a red spot beginning to dawn, nevertheless, in either cheek.

“Well, he’s square,” asserted Tim judicially. “Understand, he don’t care how he gets a thing just so he gets it, but if he makes you a promise he’ll keep it. That’s what I call square.”

Gail nodded. She had discerned that quality in Allison.

“What I like about him is that he always wins,” went on Tim. “Nobody in this town has ever passed him the prunes. Do you know what he did? He started with two miles of rust and four horse cars, and now he owns the whole works.”

Gail knitted her brows. She had heard something of this marvellous tale before, and it had interested her. She had been groping for an explanation of Allison’s tremendous force.

“That was a wonderful achievement. How did he accomplish it?”

“Made ’em get off and walk!” boasted Tim, with vast pride in the fact. “Any time Eddie run across a man that had a street car line, he choked it out of him. He’s a wizard.”

Tim’s statement seemed to be somewhat clouded in metaphor, but Gail managed to gather that Allison had possibly used first-principle methods on his royal pathway to success.

“You mean that he drove them out of business.”

“Pushed ’em off!” and Tim’s voice was exultant.

“I don’t think I understand business,” worried Gail. “It seems so cruel.”

“So is baseball, if you want to figure that it’s a shame the losers have to take a licking,” chuckled Tim. “Anybody Allison likes is lucky,” and with the friendly familiarity of an old man, Tim Corman patted Gail on the glove.

“It occurs to me that I’m neglecting my opportunities,” observed Gail, rising. “I’m supposed to be running this car,” and going to the glass door she looked into the motorman’s compartment, which was large, and had seats in it, and all sorts of mysterious tools and appliances in the middle of the floor.

Tim Corman, as Allison’s personal representative, was right on the spot.

“Come on out,” he invited, and opened the door, whereupon the three responsible looking men immediately arose.

Gail hesitated, then smiled. She turned to look at the others, half wondering if she should invite them to come, and whether a crowd would be welcomed, but the quartette were gathered on the observation platform, watching the tunnel swallowing itself in a faraway point.

“Mr. Greggory, general manager of the Municipal Transportation Company, Miss Sargent,” introduced Tim, and the fat man bowed, with still another portion of that secret opinion removed. “Mr. Lincoln, general engineer of the Transportation Company, Miss Sargent,” and the thin-faced man with the high forehead and the little French moustache, bowed, smiling his decided approval. “Mr. McCarthy, general construction manager of the Transportation Company, Miss Sargent,” and the red-faced man with the big red moustache, bowed, grinning. Tim Corman led Gail forward to the motorman, and tapped him on the shoulder. “Show her how it works, Tom,” he directed.

So it was that Edward E. Allison, standing quite alone on the platform of the Hoadley Park station, saw the approaching trial trip car stop, and run slowly, and run backwards, and dart forwards, and perform all sorts of experimental movements, before it rushed down to his platform, with a rosy-cheeked girl standing at the wheel, her brown eyes sparkling, her red lips parted in a smile of ecstatic happiness, her hat off and her waving brown hair flowing behind her in the sweep of the wind. To one side stood a highly pleased motorman, while a short, thick old man, and a careless fat man, and a man with a high forehead and one with a red moustache, all smiling indulgently, clogged the space in the rear.

Allison boarded the car, and greeted his guests, and came straight through to the motorman’s cage, as Gail, in response to the clang of the bell, pulled the lever. She was just getting that easy starting glide, and she was filled with pride in the fact.

“You should not stand bare-headed in front of that window,” greeted Allison, almost roughly; and he closed it.

Gail turned very sweetly to the motorman.

“Thank you,” she said, and gave him the lever, then she walked back into the car. It had required some repression to avoid recognising that dictatorial attitude, and Allison felt that she was rather distant, and wondered what was the matter; but he was a practical minded person, and he felt that it would soon blow over.

“This is the deepest line in the city,” he informed her, as she led the way back to the group in the parlour division. “Every subway we build presents more difficult problems of construction because of the crossings.”

“I should think it would be most difficult,” she indifferently responded, and hurried back to the girls.

“I feel horribly selfish,” she confessed, slipping her arm around Lucile on one side and Arly on the other; and the Reverend Smith Boyd, strangely inclined to poetry these days, compared them to the Three Graces, with Hope in the centre. They were an attractive picture for the looking of any man; the blonde Lucile, the brown Gail, and the black-haired Arly, all fresh-cheeked, slender, and sparkling of eye.

“I’m glad your conscience smites you,” smiled Arly. “Wasn’t it fun?”

“The most glorious in the world!” and Gail glanced doubtfully at Tim Corman, who was right on the spot.

“Come on, girls,” heartily invited Tim, who could catch a hint as fast as any man. “I’ll introduce you to Tom,” and, profoundly happy in his gallantry, he returned to the front of the car with a laughing blonde on one arm and a laughing brunette on the other.

Allison turned confidently to chat with Gail, but that young lady, smiling on the Reverend Smith Boyd, moved back to the observation platform, and the Reverend Smith Boyd followed the smile with alacrity.

“I’ve been neglecting this view,” she observed, gazing out into the rapidly diminishing perspective, then she glanced up sidewise at the tall young rector, whose eyes were perfectly blue.

He answered something or other, and the conversation was so obviously a tête-à-tête that Allison remained behind. Ted Teasdale had long since found, in the engineer, a man who knew motor boating in every phase of its failures; so that Allison and Tim Corman were in sole possession of the parlour compartment, and Tim looked up at Allison with a complacent grin, as the latter sat beside him.

“Well, Eddie, I put in a plug for you,” stated Tim, with the air of one looking for approval.

“How’s that?” inquired Allison, abstractedly.

“Boosted you to the girl. Say, she’s a peach!”

Allison looked quickly back at the platform, and then frowned down on his zealous friend Tim.

“What did you tell Miss Sargent about me?”

“Don’t you worry, Eddie; it’s all right,” laughed Tim. “I hinted to her, so that she had to get it, that you’re about the most eligible party in New York. I let her know that no man in this village had ever skinned you. She wanted to know how you made this big combination, and I told her you made ’em all get off; pushed ’em off the map. Take it from me, Eddie, after I got through, she knew where to find a happy home.”

Allison’s brows knitted in quick anger, and then suddenly he startled the subway with its first loud laugh. He understood now, or thought he did, Gail’s distant attitude; but, knowing what was the matter, he could easily straighten it out.

“Thanks, Tim,” he chuckled. “Let’s talk business a minute. I had you hold up the Vedder Court condemnation because I got a new idea last night. Those buildings are unsafe.”

“Well, the building commissioners have to make a living,” considered Tim.

“That’s what I think,” agreed Allison.

Tim Corman looked up at him shrewdly out of his puffy slits of eyes, for a moment, and considered.

“I get you,” he said, and the business talk being concluded, Allison went forward.

“McCarthy,” he snapped, in a voice which grated; “what are all those boxes back in the beginning of the ‘Y’ of the West Docks branch?”

“Blasting material,” and McCarthy looked uncomfortable.

“Get it out,” ordered Allison, and returned to Tim.

The girls and Ted came back presently, and, with their arrival, Gail brought the Reverend Smith Boyd into the crowd, thereupon they resolved themselves into some appearance of sociability, and Allison, for the amusement of the company, slyly started old Tim Corman into a line of personal reminiscences, so replete in unconscious humour and so frank in unconscious disclosure of callous knavery, that the company needed no other entertainment.

Out into the open, where the sun paled the electric lights of the car into a sickly yellow, up into the air, peering into third story tenements and down narrow alleys, aflutter with countless flapping pieces of laundry work, then suddenly into the darkness of the tunnel again, then out, on the surface of country fields, and dreary winter landscape, to the terminal. It was more cosy in the tunnel, and they returned there for lunch, while the general manager and the general engineer and the general construction manager of the Municipal Transportation Company, with occasional crisp visits from President Allison, soberly discussed the condition of the line. The Reverend Smith Boyd displayed an unexpected technical interest in that subject. He had taken an engineering course in college, and, in fact, he had once wavered seriously between that occupation and the Church, and he put two or three questions so pertinent that he awakened a new respect in Allison. Allison took the rector to the observation platform to explain something in the construction of the receding tunnel, and as they stood there earnestly talking, with concentrated brows and eyes searching into each other for quick understanding, Gail Sargent was suddenly struck by a wonder as to what makes the differences in men. Allison, slightly stocky, standing with his feet spread sturdily apart and his hands in his coat pockets, and his clean-cut profile slightly upturned to the young rector, was the very epitome of force, of decisive action, of unconquerable will. He seemed to fairly radiate resistless energy, and as she looked, Gail was filled with the admiration she had often felt for this exponent of the distinctively American spirit of achievement. She had never seen the type in so perfect an example, and again there seemed to wave toward her that indefinable thrill with which he had so often impressed her. Was the thrill altogether pleasurable? She could not tell, but she did know that with it there was mixed a something which she could not quite fathom in herself. Was it dislike? No, not that. Was it resentment? Was it fear? She asked herself that last question again.

The young rector was vastly different; taller and broader-shouldered, and more erect of carriage, and fully as firm of profile, he did not somehow seem to impress her with the strength of Allison. He was more temperamental, and, consequently, more susceptible to change; therefore weaker. Was that deduction correct? She wondered, for it troubled her. She was not quite satisfied.

Suddenly there came a dull, muffled report, like the distant firing of a cannon; then an interval of silence, an infinitesimal one, in which the car ran smoothly on, and, half rising, they looked at each other in startled questioning. Then, all at once, came a stupendous roar, as if the world had split asunder, a jolting and jerking, a headlong stoppage, a clattering, and slapping and crashing and grinding, deafening in its volume, and with it all, darkness; blackness so intense that it seemed almost palpable to the touch!

There was a single shriek, and a nervous laugh verging on hysteria. The shriek was from Arly, and the laugh from Lucile. There was a cry from the forward end of the car, as if some one in pain. A man’s yell of fright; Greggory the general manager. A strong hand clutched Gail’s in the darkness, firm, reassuring. The rector.

“Don’t move!” it was the voice of Allison, crisp, harsh, commanding.

“Anybody hurt?” Tim Corman, the voice of age, but otherwise steady. One could sense, somehow, that he sat rigid in his chair, with both hands on his cane.

“It’s me,” called Tom, the motorman. “Head cut a little, arm bruised. Nothing bad.”

“Gail?” Allison again.

“Yes.” Clear voiced, with the courage which has no sex.

“Mrs. Teasdale? Mrs. Fosland?”

Both all right, one a trifle sharp of voice, the other nervous.

“Ted? Doctor Boyd?” and so through the list. Everybody safe.

“It is an accidental blast,” said the voice of Allison. He had figured that a concise statement of just what had happened might expedite organisation. “We are below the Farmount Ridge, over a hundred feet deep, and the tube has caved in on us. There must be no waste of exertion. Don’t move until I find what electrical dangers there are.”

They obeyed his admonition not to move, even to the extent of silence; for there was an instinct that Allison might need to hear minutely. He made his way into the front compartment, he called the chief engineer. There was a clanking of the strange looking implements on the floor of the car. A match flared up, and showed the pale face of the engineer bending over.

“No matches,” ordered Allison. “We may need the oxygen.”

He and the engineer made their way back into the parlour compartment. They took up the door of the motor well in the floor, and in a few minutes they replaced it. From the sounds they seemed remarkably clumsy.

“That much is lucky,” commented Allison. “The next thing is to dig.”

They were quiet a moment.

“In front or behind?” wondered the engineer.

Again a pause.

“In front,” decided Allison. “The explosion came from that direction, and has probably shaken down more of the soil there than behind, but it’s solid clay in the rear, and further out.”

Gail felt the rector’s hand suddenly leave her own. It had been wonderfully comforting there in the dark; so firm and warm and steady. He had not talked much to her, just a few reassuring words, in that low, melodious voice, which thrilled her as did occasionally the touch of Allison’s hand, as did the eyes of Dick Rodley. But she had received more strength from the voice of Allison. He was big, Allison, a power, a force, a spirit of command. She began, for the first time, to comprehend his magnitude.

“What have we to dig with?” The voice of the Reverend Smith Boyd, and there was a note of eagerness in it.

“The benches up in front here,” yelled McCarthy, and there was a ripping sound as he tore the seat from one of them.

“Pardon me.” It was the voice of the rector, up in front.

“The balance of you sit down, and keep rested,” ordered Allison, now also up in front. “McCarthy, Boyd and I go first.”

The long struggle began. The girls grouped together in the back of the car, moving but very little, for there was much broken glass about. Up in front the three men could be heard making an opening into the débris through the forward windows. They talked a great deal, at first, strong, capable voices. They were interfering with each other, then helping, combining their strength to move heavy stones and the like, then they were silent, working independently, or in effective unison.

Tim Corman was the possessor of a phosphorescent-faced watch, with twenty-two jewels on the inside and a ruby on the winding stem, and he constituted himself timekeeper.

“Thirty minutes,” he called out. “It’s our shift.”

“You’d better save yourself, Tim,” suggested Greggory, in a kindly tone.

“I’ll do as much as any of you!” growled old Tim, with the will, if not the quality, of youth in his voice. “Will one of you girls take care of my rings?” and stripping them from his fingers, he laid them carefully in the outstretched hands of Arly. There was a good handful of them.

The men crawled in from outside, but they stayed in the front compartment. The air was growing a trifle close, and they breathed heavily.

“Good-bye Girl,” called the gaily funereal voice of Ted Teasdale. “Husband is going to work.”

“Put on your gloves,” Lucile reminded him.

“Greggory,” called Allison.

“Here,” responded the careless fat man. “How did you find it?”

“Loose,” reported Allison, and there was a sound suspiciously like grunting, as Greggory crawled through the narrow opening.

Another interminable wait, while the air grew more stifling. There was no further levity after Lincoln and the motorman and McCarthy had come back; for the condition was becoming serious. Some air must undoubtedly be finding its way to the car through the loose débris, but the carbonic acid gas exhaled from a dozen pairs of lungs was beginning to pocket, and the opening ahead, though steadily pushing forward, displayed no signs of lessening solidity.

They established shorter shifts now; a quarter of an hour. The men came silently in and out, and as silently worked, and as silently rested, while the girls carried that heavy burden of women’s hardest labour; waiting!

Greggory was the first to give out, then the injured motorman. When their turns came, they had not the strength nor the air in their lungs. Strong McCarthy was the next to join them.

The shifts had reduced to two, of two men each by now; Ted and old Tim, and Allison and the rector; and these latter two worked double time. Their lips and their tongues were parched and cracking, and in their periods of rest they sat motionlessly facing each other, with a wheeze in the drawing of their breath. Their stentorian breathing could be heard from the forward end of their little tunnel clear back into the car, where the three girls were battling to preserve their senses against the poisonous gases which were now all that they had to breathe. Acting on the rector’s advice, they had stood up in the car to escape the gradually rising level of the carbonic gas, stood, as the time progressed, with their mouths agape and their breasts heaving and sharp pains in their lungs at every breath. Arly dropped, silently crumpling to the floor; then, a few minutes later, Lucile, and, panic-stricken by the thought that they had gone under, Gail felt her own senses reeling, when suddenly, looking ahead through eyes which were staring, she saw a crack of blessed light!

There was a hoarse cry from ahead! The crack of light widened. Another one appeared, some four feet to the right of it, and Gail already fancied that she could feel a freshening of the air she breathed with such tearing pain. Against the light of the openings, two figures, the only two which were left to work, strove, at first with the slow, limp motions of exhaustion, and then with the renewed vigour of approaching triumph. She could distinguish them clearly now, by the light which streamed in, the stocky, strong figure of Allison and the tall, sinewy figure of the rector. They were working frantically, Allison with his coat off, and the rector with his coat and vest both removed, and one sleeve torn almost entirely from his shirt, revealing his swelling biceps, and a long, red scratch. Gail’s senses were numbed, so that they were reduced to almost merely optical consciousness, so that she saw things photographically; but, even in her numbness, she realised that what she had thought a trace of weakness in the rector, was only the grace which had rounded his strength.

The two figures bent inward toward each other. There was a moment of mighty straining, and then the whole centre between the two cracks rolled away. A huge boulder had barred the path, and its removal let down a rush of pure, fresh air from the ground above, let down, too, a flood of dazzling light; and in the curving, under-rim of the opening, stood the two stalwart men who were the survival of the fittest! The mere instinct of self-preservation drove Gail forward, with a cry, toward the source of that life-giving air, and she scrambled through the window and ran toward the two men. They came hurriedly down to meet her, and each gave her a hand.

CHAPTER XIV
THE FREE AND ENTIRELY UNCURBED

Gail Sargent became suddenly and acutely aware of an entirely new and ethnological subdivision of the human race. She had known of Caucasians, Mongolians, Ethiopians, and the others, but now she was to meet the representatives of the gay, carefree, and entirely uncurbed metropolitan press! They figuratively swarmed from the ground, dropped from the eaves, and wriggled from under the rugs!

Immediately after Gail had reached home from the accident in the subway, and had been put to bed and given tea, and had repeatedly assured the doctor there was nothing the matter with her, they brought, at her urgent request, copies of the “extras,” which were already being yelled from every street corner and down every quiet residence block.

The accounts were, in the main, more or less accurate, barring the fact that they started with the assumption that there had been one hundred in Allison’s party, all killed. Later issues, however, regretfully reduced the number of dead to forty, six, and finally none, at which point they became more or less coherent, and gave an exact list of the people who were there, the cause of the accident, and a most appreciatively accentuated history of the heroic work of the men. Although she regretted that her picture had by this time crept into the public prints, grouped with the murders and defalcations of the day, she was able to overlook this personal discomfort as one of the minor penalties which civilisation has paid for its progress; like electric light bugs and electric fan neuralgia, and the smell of gasolene.

Long before this period, however, the reporters had tracked her to her lair; so long before, in fact, that there had been three of them waiting on the doorstep when she was brought into the house, eager young men, with a high spirit of reverence and delicacy, which was concentrated entirely on their jobs. They would have held her on the doorstep until she fainted or dropped dead, if, by so doing, they could have secured one statement, or hint of a statement, upon which they could have fastened something derogatory to her reputation, or the reputation of any of her family or friends; for that was great stuff, and what the public wanted; and they would have photographed her gleefully in the process of expiring. Aunt Helen Davies, being a woman of experience, snatched Gail into the house before they had taken more than eight or nine photographs of her, but, from that instant, the doorbell became a nuisance and the telephone bell a torture! Both were finally disconnected, but, at as late an hour as one A.M., the house was occasionally assaulted.

By that time Gail had telegrams of frantic inquiry from all her friends back home, including the impulsive Clemmens, and particularly including a telegram from her mother, stating that that highly agitated lady could not secure a reservation on the first train on account of its being Saturday night, but that she would start on the fast eleven-thirty the next morning, whereat Gail kissed the telegram, and cried a little, and gave way to the moist joy of homesickness.

In the meantime, the representatives of the gay and carefree and absolutely uncurbed metropolitan press, were by no means discouraged by the fact that they had not been able to secure much, except hectic imaginings from the exterior of the Sargent house. They were busy in every other possible direction, with the same commendable persistence which we observe in an ant trying to drag a grasshopper up and down a cornstalk on the way home. They secured a straight story from Allison, a modest one from the rector, and variously viewed experiences from other male members of the party, and collected huge piles of photographs, among them the charming pictures of Gail, which had previously been printed on the innocent pages of arrivals at Palm Beach and the Riviera and other fashionable winter resorts, the whole spread being headed “What Society Is Doing.”