The March winds blustered over Boston, and the cold salt smell of the ocean was borne tempestuously in upon the shivering city. Chill and keen out of the northeast came the air that hinted not at all of spring, but urgently of winter. The people in the streets walked briskly, with no laggard steps; they were accustomed to this sort of untimely treatment from the New England climate, and they had no intention of being betrayed thereby into pondering over southern lands or sunny vineclad hillsides where summer always lingered. Boston might not be climatically Utopian, but there was at all events something virile, something manly and admirable about a sort of weather for which no other good word could be used.

Between the tall buildings in Kilby Street, where now for three weeks the current of the insurance world had been flowing with quickened, almost feverish pulse, the activity on this blustering day in middle March was undiminished. Of the hastily arranged adjustment offices which the magnitude of the conflagration had made necessary, nearly all had been given up, and the comparatively few uncompleted adjustments of losses were now being handled through the regular offices.

It had been a titanic task, that of adjusting fire losses extending in the aggregate to between one and two hundred millions of dollars—for there were some indications that the Boston property damage would reach the latter figure. But after three weeks of steady work, when the lines of claimants before the adjusters' doors had hardly slackened a moment, the worst was over. Three fourths of the claims had been settled; satisfactorily to all concerned by the larger and more responsible companies; on a basis of offered compromise by those institutions tottering on the brink of insolvency; dubiously, or with craven and flagrant unfairness by the stricken "wildcats," the irresponsible undergrounders of America and Europe. For every great fire unearths the fact that there are always companies who will gladly accept premiums,—often at surprisingly low rates,—although they are only mildly addicted to the payment of losses. And every conflagration also uncovers the fact that there are many penny-wise citizens who purchase this class of indemnity. A great fire cleans, as nothing else does, the fire insurance stage of all but the fittest.

From this calamity, the greatest which had ever visited the city, Boston had, after a timeless period of uncomprehending and demoralized helplessness, leaped anew into activity and life. From all over the country, almost from all over the world, the need of the stricken city was met by a magnificent and human response. A vast catastrophe becomes nearly worth while by virtue of the humanity it discovers. Food, clothing, money—all were donated with lavish hands, and aid was rushed to Boston by a hundred trains. In comparison with the area burned over, the number of people made homeless was not great; and in three weeks the city had somehow managed to drink up and absorb this surplus without leaving a sign.

Life had now begun to move more normally again; and already the city's gaze went forward toward what was to be, rather than backward at what had been. But in a certain Kilby Street office two men were talking, one of whom still looked somewhat gloomily back, while the other, with a smile of transcendent optimism, was engaged in the cosmic process of turning Boston's holocaust into a fiery but triumphant feather for his own cap.

"Has that draft come in yet, Benny?" he was demanding.

"Came this morning," answered Cole, a trifle sourly. "Here it is."

"Would you mind letting me have it? Thanks. This is the last one, isn't it? They're all here now?"

"Yes," said Cole, curtly; "this is the last."

"If you'll give me a large envelope, I'll take them with me, then," returned the first speaker. "With a golden touch like Midas of old will I go forth into the presence of my distinguished relation. Benny, you are a base soul with no instincts above the commercial. You do not appreciate the situation. We are rapidly approaching what is vulgarly termed the psychological moment. If you had any more feeling than a dying invertebrate, you would want to come along and witness the ceremony, which is entirely private and visitors admitted by card only."

"Thanks, but I don't care to," said Cole, shortly.

Since the change which came over the complexion of matters in his world, Cole was much less assured and less assertive than before. The receipt this morning of the Salamander's final and largest loss draft marked the last public connection between that company and the Osgood office. The Salamander had reinsured, and the news of its fall was abroad on the streets of Boston as in New York, the insurance talk of all the towns. O'Connor, temporarily at least, had disappeared, and no man knew what chasm had swallowed him up. So far as Osgood and Company were concerned, he and his company were both dead issues; and once more in the old office in the corner Mr. Osgood could be seen in his wonted place.

Immediately following the conflagration Mr. Osgood had quietly resumed his authority as active head of the firm; and the Guardian, having taken over the Salamander's unburned business, which was in reality its own, once more acknowledged as its Boston representatives Messrs. Silas Osgood and Company. Of course the separation rule of the Boston Board was still nominally in force; but with the legal decision pending there was no disposition on the part of any agency or of any company to force an action of any sort. In the face of a matter so great as the conflagration had been, the smaller things, the lesser animosities, were allowed to slip peacefully into forgotten limbo. In due time the separation rule, its chief protagonist discredited and gone none knew where, would be repealed, either under legal compulsion or without. When that day came, the Guardian would be back in the position it had always enjoyed until Mr. O'Connor played—and lost—his meteoric game.

In Mr. Cole's office, meanwhile, the small pile of checks and drafts was being counted over with scrupulous care by Mr. Wilkinson.

"They seem to be in order," he said. "Three hundred and fifty-five thousand, six hundred and eighty-seven dollars and fifty-two cents. Benny, a thought strikes me! Why should not an insurance broker get a commission on losses as well as premiums? It seems to me that that is a very reasonable idea—I wonder it has never occurred to anybody before."

"You get your commission when the line is rewritten, of course," Cole responded. "What more do you want?"

"Why, that's so; I hadn't thought of that. I presume that such an operation will be more or less lucrative—unless my sagacious though unwilling father-in-law executes his sometime threat."

"Oh, I don't believe even John M. Hurd would be such a jackal without benefit of clergy as to do that."

"Well, perhaps not. Do you think of anything else, Benny, before I depart?"

"Absolutely nothing. And for heaven's sake get out!—I'm busy, and you lend an atmosphere of inertia to the whole place."

"And yet," returned Mr. Wilkinson, suavely, rising, nevertheless,—"and yet this is, in the plebeian phrase of the world of trade, my busy day. To be sure I have other occasional days when I handle transactions that run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars; but I don't mind admitting to you that these usually take place in the last ineffable hour of slumber preceding the dawn. But to-day—to-day it is true! Benny, I will go to the length of buying you a drink, a short and frugal drink."

"At eleven A.M.? Not for me," responded Cole. "Run along."

"I go," rejoined the other, gracefully, and the door swung shut behind his debonaire retreat.

A few minutes later to the youth from South Framingham he spoke nonchalantly:—

"Mr. Hurd?"

The calm presumption of that rising inflection seemed to indicate the absence of all doubt as to whether Mr. Hurd would receive him. The South Framingham scion regarded him with bovine gaze.

"Yes, I guess he's in," he said dubiously.

"Then tell him, if you please, that Mr. Charles Wilkinson wishes to see him on a matter of important business." The sentence ended so incisively that South Framingham blinked. Any display of emotion more significant was not, perhaps, to be expected. The messenger and his message started vaguely toward the door of Mr. Hurd's private office, and for an awkward moment no sound came forth.

"He says to come in," said South Framingham, reappearing.

"With alacrity but dignity," said Charles to himself; and found himself in another moment in the presence of Mr. Hurd. The traction magnate did not rise. He laid the paper which he had been reading on the desk before him, and looked fixedly across it at the intruder.

"Good-morning, sir," said Mr. Wilkinson, cheerfully.

Mr. Hurd's response to this greeting could only be denominated a grunt, but his visitor had no desire to force an issue of cordiality, so, waiving the doubtful courtesy of this reply, he continued:—

"Mrs. Hurd is well, I trust?"

"Mrs. Hurd is quite well, thank you. Did you come here through any apprehension about her health?" inquired the gentleman at the desk, with some degree of asperity to be detected in his tone by one as well acquainted with him as was Charlie. "I understood from my clerk that you came on business."

"And so I did," said the unruffled Wilkinson, "although I always endeavor that business and courtesy shall not necessarily exclude one another."

The financier looked sharply at the young man; but he felt that he was scarcely in a position to take offense at such a commendable statement.

"My business," continued the visitor, "deals with one of the best single pieces of business you ever did for the Massachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company."

"Is the loss finally closed up?" said Mr. Hurd, curtly.

His son-in-law stood dramatically before him; he slipped his left hand into the inner breast pocket where reposed the documents with which his coup was to be made.

"Mr. Hurd," he said impressively, "you permitted me to place the insurance on your trolley system because I convinced you that it ought to be insured. Do you recall what I said about the conflagration hazard in the congested district of Boston? Well, I won't repeat it, but until I called it to your notice you had never given it serious consideration. And even after the schedule was placed, you said that another year you would not carry insurance. You may also recall that you withheld your consent to a certain marriage, which I proposed to contract with a member of your family, and which—"

"Stick to the matter in hand," suggested the traction magnate, tartly.

"I am doing so, because the point I want to make is this. On both these matters, if you'll pardon my saying so, you were equally wrong. You were afraid that as a son-in-law all my entries would be on the wrong side of your ledger. Well, I don't believe I'll overdraw my account with you for some little time, Mr. Hurd, for I hand you herewith—as we say to our stenographers—to the order of the Massachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company, checks and drafts to the amount of three hundred and fifty-five thousand, six hundred and eighty-seven dollars and fifty-two cents, in payment of the loss on your Pemberton Street car barn and power house and a few minor items. Here they are, and, to use a colloquialism, I want to rub them in. Not to glorify my own acumen or to minimize yours,—you showed good judgment to insure your property,—but to prove to you that you made a mistake about me."

"A mistake?" said the other man.

"A colossal mistake. Your only objection to me as a son-in-law was on financial grounds. Show me, if you can, any young man you could have picked out as a husband for your daughter, who within a few months could have saved your company three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. No, Mr. Hurd, you've done me a very great injustice. And now, I'm going to ask two things of you."

"And what are they?" inquired Mr. Hurd.

"The first is your order for rewriting the schedule on the traction properties. We'll take up the second when we've finished that."

John M. Hurd gave a half hitch in his chair, and turned his face toward the window, the very casement out of which he had gazed on the day when the fate of Mr. Wilkinson's scheme was first decided. Thoughtfully he looked out and down the busy street. His visitor, by way of gently stimulating his reverie, laid the companies' loss drafts within an inch of his unmoving fingers. Unconsciously those fingers, which had through the long years acquired an inalienable tendency toward the acquisition of legal tender in whatever form proffered—those fingers slowly, almost automatically, but irrevocably, closed upon the little packet.

It seemed as though, from the contact, a soothing hint of balsam-laden pines, of comfort and satisfaction for the soul, must have proceeded from those oblong papers. Charlie, keenly watching, beheld the stony countenance in front of him, as if permeated by some ineffable warmth, stir and become human. The miracle of Galatea was worked in this face before the very gaze of him who had dispensed the beneficent influence. The grim lines around the mouth lost their inflexible rigor; and slowly, unwillingly, almost shamefacedly there stole into the hard old visage the hint, the wraith, the shadow of a smile.

Wise in his generation, Wilkinson left the work to the magic and sovereign forces now at play; he did not risk marring the alchemy by a single word. After a moment which seemed an hour he found himself once more confronted by the direct observation of his step-uncle.

"You can have your trolley schedule," said John M. Hurd. "You are certainly entitled to it. What else you want I dare say I can guess. . . . Suppose you bring Isabel up to Beacon Street this afternoon to take tea with her mother—and me."

If Mr. Wilkinson cut a pigeon wing in the outer office, it was only the scion of South Framingham whose amazement is recorded. John M. Hurd, still smiling faintly, sat reflectively eyeing the little pile of checks which his visitor had left, until at last he rang for his cashier.

"Endorse these and have them deposited immediately, Mr. Walsh," he said.

Meanwhile the telephone wires were buzzing under Mr. Wilkinson's energetic advertisement of the latest society note.

"Extry! Extry!" he announced to Isabel. "All about the reconciliation of trust magnate with beautiful though erring daughter! Extry! All about the soothing and emollient influence of a little packet of stamped paper! No, I've not gone suddenly insane, and I'll come home about four, for we are due for tea at the residence of Mr. and Mrs. John M. Hurd."

To Deerfield Street, also, the glad word presently went, to meet there the sincere congratulations of Miss Helen Maitland, who held the other end of the jubilant telephone.

"You'd better come, too, Helen. We'll stop for you. I really think it would be much smoother if you were along. And besides, Charlie says we ought to get father on record before a witness in case a conservative turn takes him again."

"I was rather expecting to have tea here," Miss Maitland confessed, after a moment's hesitancy. "Yes, Mr. Smith said he would probably come. Very well—I will bring him along, if you'd really like to have him, with great pleasure. You'll call for us, Isabel? Au revoir, then."

It was shortly after five o'clock when the Hurds' butler opened the front door to admit a company of four. These intruders, waiting no bidding and ignoring altogether the fact that one of their number had been forbidden the house, made their cheerful way, headed by Mrs. Wilkinson, into the drawing room, there to greet with effusive welcome a stern-faced, elderly lady, who met them with a broad smile, but who almost instantly, to her own infinite surprise and discomfiture, burst into tears. These rapidly abated, when there was heard a sound in the hall, a sound which the quick ears of Mr. Wilkinson distinguished at once.

"The lion comes!" he murmured in Isabel's ear; and an involuntary hush descended upon the company. Thud, thud, thud—the firm steps approached; the arras was drawn back by a deliberate hand; and into the drawing room, his manner as easy and composed as ever, came Mr. Hurd. Two steps he made inside the room, then stopped. His glance instantly comprehended the little company, and just for a moment the old, cold light shot into his eye. But it was only for a moment.

"My dear Isabel, I am very glad to see you home again."

The greeting which the financier would have extended to his other guests was lost forever in the impulsive rush which landed Mrs. Wilkinson in her father's arms. Any regret which may have lingered was banished in the shock of this impact; and it was a resigned parent who emerged from this embrace to resume his corner in the reunited world.

It remained for his son-in-law to pronounce the valedictory over the vanishing fragments of the family breach.

"Mr. Hurd, ever since the day you flung in my astounded face my character and attainments, depicted in simple but effective words of one syllable, I have felt that there was not only force, but a good deal of truth, in your pungent observations. As I remember telling you at the time, had I appreciated the disgraceful facts as you summed them up, I could only in justice to Isabel have joined my efforts to your own in endeavoring to prevent so fatal an alliance. But it was too late. And now that the thing is done, the child of Mr. Hurd, having inherited some of that gentleman's fixity of purpose and tenacity of idea, is still of the opinion—Isabel, even if I am wrong, please do not contradict me—that she needs the stimulus of my desultory presence to keep her en rapport with life. Isabel has come to find strangely piquant the sensation of uncertainty as to the approaching meal. She has come to feel that certainty in such a matter is a species of bourgeoisie. At all events we are now Mr. and Mrs. Wilkinson; and however deeply we regret the lack of enthusiasm in that connection of my esteemed father-in-law, I can only suggest to him that, although probably no one in the world has as poor an opinion of me as he has, if he keeps that opinion to himself there is no reason why the world in general should ever learn the truth. Certainly it shall be my life work to prevent it; and maybe when in the years to come I am passing the plate in some far suburban tabernacle of worship, all will be forgotten. Helen, may I trouble you to hand me those sandwiches?"

Mr. Hurd emitted a dry chuckle.

"For the honor of the family, Charlie, I'll never tell," he said.

It was dark when at last Miss Maitland, under the escort of Smith, started homeward toward Deerfield Street. And even then, not so directly homeward lay their course as the hour might have warranted. By an impulse which neither resisted, their footsteps turned southeastward toward the place where they had first viewed the land of the fire's reaping. On the steel bridge over the railroad tracks they found themselves at last.

"We didn't really intend to come here, did we?" asked the girl, with a smile.

"Somebody must have intended it," argued her companion; "although I confess that my part in it seemed entirely a passive one. Still, it is a good place to come, excepting for the cinders which fly into one's eyes—as one did then."

Northward, under the pale light of the stars, the barren acres stretched away till they reached the point where the builded city recommenced. The wind, fallen to a breeze, brought still a faint hint of smoke out of the ground, as though in insistent reminiscence of the fire's breath. On the edge of this zone gleamed the city's lights, and Smith was vaguely reminded of the lights on the Jersey shore as he could see them from his window.

"Do you remember the night you showed me the lights of New York?" asked
Helen, softly.

"I shall never stop remembering it," he answered. "Some day, when I get to be so valuable or valueless that I can be spared from the Guardian, we will go and see the lights of all the other cities of the world. Shall we?"

"There will be none like yours—like ours."

"As there are no lights for me like those within your eyes."

"But I thought we were going to Robbinsville!" said the girl, "to see a harness shop."

"We will go there, too," he answered. "Oh, life will be all too short for you and me!"

It was some time later when the little bridge was left once more to the cinders and to itself. Behind the backs of the two who walked slowly homeward, the plain, which once had been a city, lay gray-black in its ashes beneath the black and gold of the cloud-flecked sky.

*******

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