It is written in the Book that holds the wisdom of our race that one who is reborn into the Kingdom of God, enters as a little child. It is there in black and white, yet few people get the idea into their consciousnesses. They expect regeneration to produce an upright man. God knows better than that. And we should know better too when it is written down for us. And so you good people who expect to see John Barclay turn rightabout face on the habits of a lifetime are to be disappointed. For a little child stumbles and falls and goes the wrong way many times before it learns the way of life. There came days after that summer night of 1904, when John Barclay fell—days when he would sneak into the stenographers' room in his office in the City and tear up some letter he had dictated, when he would send a telegram annulling an order, when he would find himself cheating and gouging his competitors or his business associates,—even days when he had not the moral courage to retrace his steps although he knew he was wrong. Shame put her brand on his heart, and his face showed to those who watched it closely—and there were scores of fellow-gamblers at the game with him, whose profits came from watching his face—his face showed forth uncertainty and daze. So men said, "The old man's off his feed," or others said, "Barclay's losing his nerve"; and still others said, "Can it be possible that the old hypocrite is getting a sort of belated conscience?"

But slowly, inch by inch, the child within him grew; he gripped his soul with the iron hand of will that had made a man of him, and when the child fell and ached with shame, Barclay's will sustained the weakling. We are so hidden by our masks that this struggle in the man's soul, though guessed at by some of those about him, was unknown to the hundreds who saw him every day. But for him the universe had changed. And as a child, amazed, he looked upon the new wonder of God's order about him and went tripping and stumbling and toppling over awkwardly through it all as one learning some new equilibrium. There were times when his heart grew sick, and he would have given it all up. There were hours when he did surrender; when he did a mean thing and gloried in it, or a cowardly thing and apologized for it. But his will rose and turned him back to his resolve. He found the big things easy, and the little things hard to do. So he kept at the big things until they had pushed him so far toward his goal that the little things were details which he repaired slowly and with anguish of humiliation in secret, and unknown even to those who were nearest to him.

And all this struggle was behind the hard face, under the broad, high forehead, back of the mean jaw, beneath the cover of the sharp brazen eyes. Even in Sycamore Ridge they did not suspect the truth until Barclay had grown so strong in his new faith that he could look at his yesterdays without shuddering.

The year of our Lord nineteen hundred and six was a slow year politically in Sycamore Ridge, so in the parliament at McHurdie's shop discussion took somewhat wider range than was usual. It may interest metaphysicians in the world at large to know that the McHurdie parliament that August definitely decided that this is not a material world; that sensation is a delusion, that the whole phantasmagoria of the outer and material world is a reaction of some sort upon the individual consciousness. Up to this point the matter is settled, and metaphysicians may as well make a record of the decision; for Watts McHurdie, Jacob Dolan, Philemon Ward, Martin Culpepper, and sometimes Oscar Fernald, know just exactly as much about it as the ablest logician in the world. It is, however, regrettable that after deciding that the external world is but a divine reaction upon the individual consciousness, the parliament was unable to reach any sort of a decision as to whose consciousness received the picture. Mr. Dolan maintained vigorously that his consciousness was the one actually affected, and that the colonel and the general and Watts were mere hallucinations of his. The general held that Jake and the others were accessory phantasms of his own dream, and Watts and the colonel, being of more poetical temperament, held that the whole outfit was a chimera in some larger consciousness, whose entity it is not given us to know. As for Oscar, he claimed the parliament was crazy, and started to prove it, when it was thought best to shift and modify the discussion; and, therefore, early in September, when the upper currents of the national atmosphere were vocal with discordant allegations, denials, accusations, and maledictions, in Watts McHurdie's shop the question before the house was, "How many people are there in the world?" For ten days, in the desultory debate that had droned through the summer, the general, true to his former contention, insisted that there was only one person in the world. Mr. Dolan, with the Celtic elasticity of reason, was willing to admit two.

"You and me and no more—all the rest is background for us," he proclaimed. "If the you of the moment is the colonel—well and good; then the colonel and I for it; but if it is the general and I—to the trees with your colonel and Watts, and the three billion others—you're merely stage setting, and become third persons."

"But," asked McHurdie, "if I exist this minute with you, and then you focus your attention on Mart there, the next minute, and he exists, what becomes of me when you turn your head from me?"

Dolan did not answer. He dipped into the Times and read awhile; and the colonel and the general got out the checkerboard and plunged into a silent game. At length Dolan, after the fashion of debaters in the parliament, came out of his newspaper and said:—

"That, Mr. McHurdie, is a problem ranging off the subject, into the theories of the essence of time and space, and I refuse to answer it."

Me Hurdie kept on working, and the hands of the clock slipped around nearly an hour. Then the bell tinkled and Neal Ward came in on his afternoon round for news to print in the next day's issue of the Banner.

"Anything new?" he asked.

"Mrs. Dorman is putting new awnings on the rear windows of her store—did you get that?" asked McHurdie.

The young man made a note of the fact.

"Yes," added Dolan, "and you may just say that Hon. Jacob Dolan, former sheriff of Garrison County, and a member of 'C' Company, well known in this community, who has been custodian of public buildings and grounds in and for Garrison County, state of Kansas, ss., is contemplating resigning his position and removing to the National Soldiers' Home at Leavenworth for the future."

Young Ward smiled, but did not take the item down in his note-book.

"It isn't time yet," he said.

"Why not?" asked Dolan.

"Only two months and a half since I printed that the last time. It can't go oftener than four times a year, and it's been in twice this year. Late in December will time it about right."

"What's the news with you, boy?" asked Dolan.

"Well," said the young man, pausing carefully as if to make a selection from a large and tempting assortment, but really swinging his arms for a long jump into the heart of the matter in his mind, "have you heard that John Barclay has given the town his pipe organ?"

"You don't say!" exclaimed McHurdie.

"Tired of it?" asked Dolan, as though twenty-five-thousand-dollar pipe organs were raining in the town every few days.

"It'll not be that, Jake," said Watts. "John is no man to tire of things."

"No, it's not that, Mr. Dolan," answered Neal Ward. "He has sent word to the mayor and council that he is going to have the organ installed in Barclay Hall this week at his own expense, and he accompanied the letter with fifty thousand dollars in securities to hire a permanent organist and a band-master for the band; and a band concert and an organ concert will alternate in the hall every week during the year. I gather from reading his letter that Mr. Barclay believes the organ will do more good in the hall than in his house."

The general and the colonel kept on at their game. Dolan whistled, and Watts nodded his head. "That's what I would say he did it for," said McHurdie.

"Are the securities N.P.C. stock?" asked Dolan, tentatively.

"No," replied Neal; "I saw them; they are municipal bonds of one sort and another."

"Well, well—Johnnie at the mill certainly is popping open like a chestnut bur. Generally when he has some scheme on to buy public sentiment he endows something with N.P.C. stock, so that in case of a lawsuit against the company he'd have the people interested in protecting the stock. This new tack is certainly queer doings. Certainly queer doings for the dusty miller!" repeated Dolan.

"Well, it's like his buying the waterworks of Bemis last month, and that land at the new pumping station, and giving the council money to build the new dam and power-house. He had no rebate or take back in that—at least no one can see it," said the young man.

"Nellie says," put in Watts, "that she heard from Mrs. Fernald, who got it from her girl, who got it from the girl who works in the Hub restaurant, who had it from Mrs. Carnine's girl—so it come pretty straight—that Lige made John pay a pretty penny for the waterworks, and they had a great row because John would give up the fight."

"Yes," replied Dolan, "it come to me from one of the nigger prisoners in the jail, who has a friend who sweeps out Gabe's bank, that he heard John and Lige dickering, and that Lige held John up for a hundred thousand cold dollars for his bargain."

"The Associated Press to-day," said young Ward, "has a story to the effect that there is a great boom in certain railroad stocks owing to some secret operations of Mr. Barclay. They don't know what he is doing, but things are pretty shaky. He refuses to make a statement."

"He's a queer canny little man," explained Watts. "You never know where he'll break out next."

"Well, he's up to some devilment," exclaimed Dolan; "you can depend on that. Why do you suppose he's laying off the hands at the strip factory?"

The young man shook his head. "Give it up. I asked Mr. Mason and the best I could get out of him was a parrot-like statement that 'owing to the oversupply of our commodity, we have decided to close operations for the present. We have, therefore,' he said pompously, 'given each of our employees unable to find immediate work here, a ticket for himself and family to any point in the United States to which he may desire to go, and have agreed to pay the freight on his household goods also.' That was every word I could get out of him—and you know Mr. Mason is pretty talkative sometimes."

"Queer doings for the dusty miller," repeated Dolan.

The group by the bench heard the slap of the checkerboard on its shelf, and General Ward cut into the conversation as one who had never been out of it. "The boy's got good blood in him; it will come out some day—he wasn't made a Thatcher and a Barclay and a Winthrop for nothing. Lizzie was over there the other night for tea with them, and she said she hadn't seen John so much like himself for years."

Young Ward went about his afternoon's work and the parliament continued its debate on miscellaneous public business. The general pulled the Times from Dolan's pocket and began turning it over. He stopped and read for a few moments and exclaimed:—

"Boys—see here. Maybe this explains something we were talking about." He began reading a news item sent out from Washington, D.C. The item stated that the Department of Commerce and Labour had scored what every one in official circles believed was the most important victory ever achieved by the government outside of a war. The item continued:—

"Within the last ten days, the head of one of the largest so-called trusts in this country called at the department, and explained that his organization, which controls a great staple commodity, was going into voluntary liquidation. The organization in question has been the subject of governmental investigation for nearly two years, and investigators were constantly hampered and annoyed by attempts of politicians of the very highest caste, outside of the White House, trying to get inspectors removed or discredited, and all along the line of its investigations the government has felt a powerful secret influence shielding the trust. As an evidence of his good faith in the disorganization, the head of the trust, while he was here, promised to send to the White House, what he called his 'political burglar's kit,' consisting of a card index, labelling and ticketing with elaborate cross references and cabinet data, every man in the United States who is in politics far enough to get to his state legislature, or to be a nominee of his party for county attorney. This outfit, shipped in a score of great boxes, was dumped at the White House to-day, and it is said that a number of the cards indicating the reputation of certain so-called conservative senators and congressmen may be framed. There is a great hubbub in Washington, and the newspaper correspondents who called at the White House on their morning rounds were regaled by a confidential glimpse into the cards and the cabinets. It is likely that the whole outfit will be filed in the Department of Commerce and Labour, and will constitute the basis of what is called around the White House to-day, a 'National Rogues' Gallery.' The complete details of every senatorial election held in the country during twelve years last past, showing how to reach any Senator susceptible to any influence whatsoever, whether political, social, or religious, are among the trophies of the chase in the hands of the Mighty Hunter for Big Game to-day."

When General Ward had finished reading, he lifted up his glasses and said: "Well, that's it, boys; John has come to his turn of the road. Here's the rest. It says: 'The corporation in question is practically controlled by one man, the man who has placed the information above mentioned in the hands of the government. It is a corporation owning no physical property whatever, and is organized as a rebate hopper, if one may so style it. The head of the corporation stated when he was here recently that he is preparing to buy in every share of the company's stock at the price for which it was sold and then—' Jake, where is page 3 with the rest of this article on it?" asked the general.

"Why, I threw that away coming down here," responded Dolan.

"Rather leaves us in the air—doesn't it?" suggested the colonel.

"Well, it's John. I know enough to know that—from Neal," said the general.

The afternoon sun was shining in the south window of the shop. Dolan started to go. In the doorway McHurdie halted him.

"Jake," he cried, pointing a lean, smutty finger at Dolan, "Jake Dolan, if there are only two people in the world, what becomes of me when you begin talking to Mart? If you knew, you would not dodge. In philosophy no man can stand on his constitutional rights. Turn state's evidence, Jake Dolan, and tell the truth—what becomes of me?"

"'Tis an improper question," replied Dolan, and then drawing himself up and pulling down the front of his coat, he added, "'Tis not a matter that may be discussed among gentlemen," and with that he disappeared.

The front door-bell tinkled, and the parliament prepared to adjourn. The colonel helped the poet close his store and bring in the wooden horse from the sidewalk, and then Molly Brownwell came with her phaeton and drove the two old men home. On the way up Main Street they overhauled Neal Ward. Mrs. Brownwell turned in to the sidewalk and called, "Neal, can you run over to the house a moment this evening?" And when he answered in the affirmative, she let the old nag amble gently up the street.

"How pretty you are, Aunt Molly," exclaimed Neal, as the gray-haired woman who could still wear a red ribbon came into the room where he sat waiting for her. The boy's compliment pleased her, and she did not hesitate to say so. But after that she plunged into the subject that was uppermost in her heart.

"Neal," she said, as she drew her chair in front of him so that she could see his face and know the truth, no matter what his lips might say, "we're partners now, aren't we, or what amounts to the same thing?" She smiled good-naturedly. "I own the overdraft at the bank and you own the mortgage at the court-house. So I am going to ask you a plain question; and if you say it isn't any of my business, I'll attempt to show you that it is. Neal," she asked, looking earnestly into his face, "why do you write to Jeanette Barclay every day of your life and not mail the letters?"

The youth flushed. "Why—Aunt Molly—how did you know?—I never told—"

"No, Neal, you never told me; but this afternoon while you we're out I was looking for Adrian's check-book; I was sure we paid Dorman's bill last April, and that I took the check over myself. I was going through the desk, and I got on your side, thinking I might have left the check-book there by mistake, and I ran into the very midst of those letters, before I knew what I was about. Now, Neal—why?"

The young man gazed at the woman seriously for a time and then parried her question with, "Why do you care—what difference can it make to you, Aunt Molly?"

"Because," she answered quickly, "because I wish to see my partner happy. He will do better work so—if you desire to put it on a cold-blooded basis. Oh, Nealie, Nealie—do you love her that much—that you take your heart and your life to her without hope or without sign or answer every day?"

He dropped his eyes, and turned his face away. "Not every day," he answered, "not every day—but every night, Aunt Molly."

"Why don't you go to her, Neal, and tell her?" asked the woman. "Is it so hopeless as that?"

"Oh, there are many reasons—why I don't go to her," he replied. After a minute's silence he went on: "In the first place she is a very rich girl, and that makes a difference—now. When she was just a young girl of eighteen, or such a matter, and I only twenty or twenty-one, we met so naturally, and it all came out so beautifully! But we are older now, Aunt Molly," he said sadly, "and it's different."

"Yes," admitted Mrs. Brownwell, "it is different now—you are right about it."

"Yes," he continued, repeating a patter which he had said to himself a thousand times. "Yes,—and then I can't say I'm sorry—for I'm not. I'd do it again. And I know how Mr. Barclay feels; he didn't leave me in any doubt about that," smiled the boy, "when I left his office that morning after telling him what I was going to do. So," he sighed and smiled in rather hopeless good humour, "I can't see my way out. Can you?"

Molly Brownwell leaned back in her chair, and closed her eyes for a minute, and then shook her head, and said, "No, Neal, not now; but there is a way—somehow—I am sure of that."

He laughed for want of any words to express his hopelessness, and the two—the youth in despair, and the woman full of hope—sat in silence.

"Neal," she asked finally, "what do you put in those letters? Why do you write them at all?"

The young man with his eyes upon the floor began, "Well—they're just letters, Aunt Molly—just letters—such as I used to write before—don't you know." His voice was dull and passionless, and he went on: "I can't tell you more about them. They're just letters." He drew in a quick long breath and exclaimed: "Oh, you know what they are—I want to talk to some one and I'm going to. Oh, Aunt Molly," he cried, "I'm not heart-broken, and all that—I'm infinitely happy. Because I still hold it—it doesn't die. Don't you see? And I know that always it will be with me—whatever may come to her. I don't want to forget—and it is my only joy in the matter, that I never will forget. I can be happy this way; I don't want to give any other woman a warmed-over heart, for this would always be there—I know it—and so I am just going to keep it." He dropped his voice again after a sigh, and went on: "There, that's all there is to it. Do you think I'm a fool?" he asked, as the colour came into his face.

"No, Neal, I don't," said Molly Brownwell, as she stood beside him. "You are a brave, manly fellow, Neal, and I wish I could help you. I don't see how now—but the way will come—sometime. Now," she added, "tell me about the paper."

And then they went into business matters which do not concern us; for in this story business conjures up the face of John Barclay—the tanned, hard face of John Barclay, crackled with a hundred wrinkles about the eyes, and scarred with hard lines about the furtive crafty mouth; and we do not wish to see that face now; it should be hidden while the new soul that is rising in his body struggles with that tough, bronzed rind, gets a focus from the heart into those glaring brass eyes, and teaches the lying lips to speak the truth, and having spoken it to look it. And so while John Barclay in the City is daily slipping millions of his railroad bonds into the market,—slipping them in quietly yet steadily withal, mixing them into the daily commerce of the country, so gently that they are absorbed before any one knows they have left his long grasping fingers,—while he is trading to his heart's content, let us forget him, and look at this young man, that September night, after he left Molly Brownwell, sitting at his desk in the office with the telephone at his elbow, with the smell of the ink from the presses in his nostrils, with the silence of the deserted office becalming his soul, and with his heart—a clean, strong, manly heart—full of the picture of a woman's face, and the vision without a hope. In his brain are recorded a thousand pictures, and millions of little fibres run all over this brain, conjuring up those pictures, and if there are blue eyes in the pictures, and lips in the pictures, and the pressure of hands, and the touch of souls in the pictures,—they are Neal Ward's pictures,—they are Mr. Higgin's pictures, and Mrs. Wiggin's pictures, and Mr. Stiggin's pictures, my dears, and alack and alas, they are the pictures of Miss Jones and Miss Lewis and Miss Thomas and Miss Smith, for that matter; and so, my dears, if we would be happy we should be careful even if we can't be good, for it is all for eternity, and whatever courts may say, and whatever churches may say, and whatever comes back with rings and letters and trinkets,—there is no divorce, and the pictures always stay in the heart, and the sum of the pictures is life.

So that September night Neal Ward went back over the old trail as lovers always will, and then his pen began to write. Now in the nature of things the first three words are not for our eyes, and to-night we must not see the first three lines nor the first thirty, nor the last three words nor the last three lines nor the last thirty lines. But we may watch him write; we may observe how longingly he looks at the telephone, as if tempted to go to it, and tell it what is in his breast. There it sits, all shiny and metallic; and by conjuring it with a number and a word, he could have her with him. Yet he does not take it up; because—the crazy loon thinks in the soul of him, that what he writes, some way, in the great unknown system of receivers and recorders and transmitters of thought that range through this universe, is pouring into her heart, and so he writes and smiles, and smiles and writes—no bigger fool than half the other lovers on the planet who, talking to their sweethearts, holding their hands and looking squarely into their eyes, deceive themselves that what they say is going to the heart, and not going in one ear and out of the other.

And now let us put on our seven-league boots and walk from September's green and brown, through October's gold and crimson, into that season of the year 1906 when Nature is shifting her scenery, making ready for the great spring show. It is bleak, but not cold; barren, but not ugly,—for the stage setting of the hills and woods and streams, even without the coloured wings and flies and the painted trees and grass, has its fine simplicity of form and grouping that are good to look upon. Observe in the picture a small man sitting on a log in a wood, looking at the stencil work of the brown and gray branches, as its shadows waver and shimmer upon the gray earth. He is poking reflectively in the earth with his cane. His boat is tied to some tree roots, and he doesn't breathe as regularly as a man should breathe who is merely thinking of his next dinner or his last dollar. He delves into himself and almost forgets to breathe at all, so deep is his abstraction. And so he sits for five minutes—ten minutes—half an hour—and save that he edges into the sun as the shadow of the great walnut tree above catches him, an hour passes and he does not move. Poking, poking, poking his stick into the mould, he has dug up much litter in an hour, and he has seen his whole life thrown up before him. In those leaves yonder is a battle—a bloody battle, and things are blistered into his boyish heart in that battle that never heal over; that tuft of sod is a girl's face—a little girl's face that he loved as a boy; there is his first lawsuit—that ragged pile of leaves by the twig at the log's end; and the twig is his first ten thousand dollars. All of it lies there before him, his victories and his defeats, his millions come, and his millions going—going?—yes, all but gone. Yonder that deep gash in the sod at the left hides a woman's face—pale, wasted, dead on her pillow; and that clean black streak on the ebony cane—that is a tear, and in the tear is a girl's face and back of hers shimmers a boy's countenance. All of John Barclay's life and hopes and dreams and visions are spread out before him on the ground. So he closes his eyes, and braces his soul, and then, having risen, whistles as he limps lightly—for a man past fifty—down to the boat. He rows with a clean manly stroke—even in an old flat-bottomed boat—through the hazy sunset into the dusk.

"Jeanette," he said to his daughter that evening at dinner, "I wish you would go to the phone, pretty soon, and tell Molly Culpepper that I want her to come down this evening. I am anxious to see her. The colonel isn't at home, or I'd have him, mother," explained Mr Barclay.

And that is why Miss Barclay called "876, Please—yes, 8-7-6;" and then said: "Hello—hello, is this 876? Yes—is Mrs. Brownwell in? Oh, all right." And then, "54, please; yes, 5-4. Is this you, Aunt Molly? Father is in town—he came in this morning and has spent the afternoon on the river, and he told me at dinner to ask you if you could run down this evening. Oh, any time. I didn't know you worked nights at the office. Oh, is Mr. Ward out of town?—I didn't know. All right, then—about eight o'clock—we'll look for you."

And that is why at the other end of the telephone, a pretty, gray-haired woman stood, and looked, and looked, and looked at a plain walnut desk, as though it was enchanted, and then slipped guiltily over to that black walnut desk, unlocked a drawer, and pulled out a whole apronful of letters.

And so the reader may know what Molly Brownwell had in that package which she put in the buggy seat beside her when she drove down to see the Barclays, that beautiful starry November night. She put the package with her hat and wraps in Jeanette's room, and then came down to the living room where John Barclay sat by the roaring fire in the wide fireplace, with a bundle beside him also. His mother was there, and his daughter took a seat beside him.

"Molly," said Barclay, with a deep sigh, "I sent for you, first, because, of all the people in the world, it is but just that you should be here, to witness what I am doing; and second, because Jane would have had you, and I want you to be with Jeanette when I tell her some things that she must know to-night—she and mother."

He was sitting in a deep easy chair, with one foot—not his lame foot—curled under him, a wiry-looking little gray cat of a man who nervously drummed on the mahogany chair arm, or kept running his hands over the carving, or folding and unfolding them, and twirled his thumbs incessantly as he talked. He smiled as he began:—

"Well, girls, father got off the chair car at Sycamore Ridge this morning, after having had the best sleep he has had in twenty years."

He paused for the effect of his declaration to sink in. Jeanette asked, "Where was the car?"

"What car?" teased the little gray cat.

"Why, our car?"

"My dear, we have no car," he smiled, with the cream of mystery on his lips. Then he licked it off. "I sold the car three weeks ago, when I left the Ridge the last time." He dropped into an eloquent silence, and then went on: "I rode in the chair car to save three dollars. I need it in my business."

His mother's blue eyes were watching him closely. She exclaimed, "John, quit your foolishness. What have you done?"

He laughed as he said: "Mother, I have returned to you poor but honest. My total assets at this minute are seventy-five million dollars' worth of stock of the National Provisions Company, tied up in this bundle on the floor here, and five thousand dollars in the Exchange National Bank of Sycamore Ridge which I have held for thirty years. I sold my State Bank stock last Monday to Gabe Carnine. I have thirty-four dollars and seventy-three cents in my pocketbook, and that is all."

The women were puzzled, and their faces showed it. So the little gray cat made short work of the mice.

"Well, now, to be brief and plain," said Barclay, pulling himself forward in his chair and thrusting out an arm and hand, as if to grip the attention of his hearers, "I have always owned or directly controlled over half the N.P.C. stock—representing a big pile of money. I am trying to forget how much, and you don't care. But it was only part of my holdings—about half or such a matter, I should say. The rest were railroad bonds on roads necessary to the company, mortgages on mills and elevators whose stock was merged in the company, and all sorts of gilt-edged stuff, bank stock and insurance company stock—all needed to make N.P.C. a dominant factor in the commercial life of the country. You don't care about that, but it was all a sort of commercial blackmail on certain fellows and interests to keep them from fighting N.P.C." Barclay hitched himself forward to the edge of his chair, and still held out his grappling-hook of a hand to hold them as he smiled and went on: "Well, I've been kind of swapping horses here for six months or so—trading my gilt-edged bonds and stuff for cash and buying up N.P.C. stock. I got a lot of it quietly—an awful lot." He grinned. "I guess that was square enough. I paid the price for it—and a little better than the price—because I had to." He was silent a few moments, looking at the fire. He meditated pleasantly: "There was some good in it—a lot of good when you come to think of it—but a fearful lot of bad! Well—I've saved the good. I just reorganized the whole concern from top to bottom—the whole blame rebate hopper. We had some patents, and we had some contracts with mills, and we had some good ideas of organization. And I've kept the good and chucked the bad. I put N.P.C. out of business and have issued stock in the new company to our minority whose stock I couldn't buy and have squeezed the water out of the whole concern. And then I took what balance I had left—every cent of it, went over the books for thirty years, and made what restitution I could." He grinned as he added: "But I found it was nearly whittlety whet. A lot of fellows had been doing me up, while I had been doing others up. But I made what restitution I could and then I got out. I closed up the City office, and moved the whole concern to St. Paul, and turned it over to the real owners—the millers and elevator men—and I have organized an industry with a capitalization small enough to make it possible for them to afford to be honest for thirty years—while our patents and contracts last, anyway." He put an elbow in the hollow of his hand, and the knuckles on his knee as he sat cross-legged, and drawled: "I wonder if it will work—" and repeated: "I wonder, I wonder. There's big money in it; she's a dead monopoly as she stands, and they have the key to the whole thing in the Commerce Department at Washington. They can keep her straight if they will." He paused for a while and went on: "But I'm tired of it. The great hulk of a thing has ground the soul out of me. So I ducked. Girls," he cried, as he turned toward them, "here's the way it is; I never did any real good with money. I'm going to see what a man can do to help his fellows with his bare hands. I want to help, not with money, but just to be some account on earth without money. And so yesterday I cleaned up the whole deal forever."

He paused to let it sink in. Finally Jeanette asked, "And are we poor, father—poor?"

"Well, my dear," he expanded, "your grandmother Barclay has always owned this house. An Omaha syndicate owns the mill. I own $5,000 in bank stock, and the boy who marries you for your money right now is going to get badly left."

"You aren't fooling me, are you, John?" asked his mother as she rose from her chair.

"No, mother," answered the son, "I've got rid of every dirty dollar I have on earth. The bank stock I bought with the money the Citizens' Committee subscribed to pay me for winning the county-seat lawsuit. As near as I can figure it out, that was about the last clean money I ever earned."

The mother walked toward her son, and leaned over and kissed him again and again as she sobbed: "Oh, John, I am so happy to-night—so happy."

In a moment he asked, "Well, Jeanette, what do you think of it?"

"You know what I think, father—you know very well, don't you?"

He sighed and nodded his head. Then he reached for the package on the floor and began cutting the strings. The bundle burst open and the stock of the National Provisions Company, issued only in fifty-thousand-dollar and one-hundred-thousand-dollar shares, littered the floor.

"Now," cried Barclay, as he stood looking at the litter, "now, Molly, here's what I want you to do: Burn it up—burn it up," he cried. "It has burned the joy out of your life, Molly—burn it up! I have fought it all out to-day on the river—but I can't quite do that. Burn it up—for God's sake, Molly, burn it up."

When the white ashes had risen up the chimney, he put on another log. "This is our last extravagance for some time, girls—but we'll celebrate to-night," he cried. "You haven't a little elderberry wine, have you, mother?" he asked. "Riley says that's the stuff for little boys with curvature of the spine—and I'll tell you it put several kinks in mine to watch that burn."

And so they sat for an hour talking of old times while the fire burned. But Molly Brownwell's mind was not in the performance that John Barclay had staged. She could see nothing but the package lying on her cloak in the girl's room upstairs. So she rose to go early, and the circle broke when she left it. She and Jeanette left John standing with his arms about his mother, patting her back while she wept.

As she closed the door of Jeanette's room behind her, Molly Brownwell knew that she must speak. "Jeanette," she said, "I don't know just how to say it, dear; but, I stole those—I mean what is in that package—I took it and Neal doesn't know I have it. It's for you," she cried, as she broke the string that tied it, and tore off the wrapping.

The girl stared at her and asked: "Why, Aunt Molly—what is it? I don't understand."

The woman in pulling her wrap from the chair, tumbled the letters to the floor. She slipped into her cloak and kissed the bewildered girl, and said as she stood in the doorway: "There they are, my dear—they are yours; do what you please with them."

She hurried down the stairs, and finding John sitting alone before the fire in the sitting room, would have bidden him good night as she passed through the room, but he stopped her.

"There is one thing more, Molly," he said, as he motioned to a chair.

"Yes," she answered, "I wondered if you had forgotten it!"

He worried the fire, and renewed the blaze, before he spoke. "What about Neal—how does he feel?"

"John," replied the woman, turning upon him a radiant face, "it is the most beautiful thing in the world—that boy's love for Jennie! Why, every night after his work is done, sitting there in the office alone, Neal writes her a letter, that he never mails; just takes his heart to her, John. I found a great stack of them in his desk the other day."

Barclay's face crinkled in a spasm of pain, and he exclaimed, "Poor little kids—poor, poor children."

"John—" Molly Brown well hesitated, and then took courage and cried: "Won't you—won't you for Ellen's sake? It is like that—like you and Ellen. And," she stammered, "oh, John, I do want to see one such love affair end happily before I die."

Barclay's hard jaw trembled, and his eyes were wet as he rose and limped across the great room. At the foot of the stairs he called up, "Don't bother with the phone, Jeanette, I'm going to use it." He explained, "The branch in her room rings when we use this one," and then asked, "Do you know where he is—at home or at the office?"

"If the ten o'clock train is in, he's at the office. If not, he's not in town."

But Barclay went to the hall, and when he returned he said, "Well, I got him; he'll be right out."

Molly was standing by the fire. "What are you going to say, John?" she asked.

"Oh, I don't know. There'll be enough for me to say, I suppose," he replied, as he looked at the floor.

She gave him her hand, and they stood for a minute looking back into their lives. They walked together toward the door, but at the threshold their eyes met and each saw tears, and they parted without words.

Neal Ward found Barclay prodding the fire, and the gray little man, red-faced from his task, limped toward the tall, handsome youth, and led him to a chair. Barclay stood for a time with his back to the fire, and his head down, and in the silence he seemed to try to speak several times before the right words came. Then he exclaimed:

"Neal, I was wrong—dead wrong—and I've been too proud and mean all this time—to say so."

Neal stared open-eyed at Barclay and moistened his lips before language came to him. Finally he said: "Well, Mr. Barclay—that's all right. I never blamed you. You needn't have bothered about—that is, to tell me."

Barclay gazed at the young man abstractedly for a minute that seemed interminable, and then broke out, "Damn it, Neal, I can't propose to you—but that's about what I've got you out here to-night for."

He laughed nervously, but the young face showed his obtuseness, and John Barclay having broken the ice in his own heart put his hands in his pockets and threw back his head and roared, and then cried merrily: "All we need now is a chorus in fluffy skirts and an orchestra with me coming down in front singing, 'Will you be my son-in-law?' for it to be real comic opera."

The young man's heart gave such a bound of joy that it flashed in his face, and the father, seeing it, was thrilled with happiness. So he limped over to Neal's chair and stood beaming down upon the embarrassed young fellow.

"But, Mr. Barclay—" the boy found voice, "I don't know—the money—it bothers me."

And John Barclay again threw his head back and roared, and then they talked it all out. He told Neal the story of his year's work. It was midnight when they heard the telephone ringing, and Barclay, curled up like an old gray cat in his chair before the fire, said for old times' sake, "Neal, go see who is ringing up at this unholy hour."

And while Neal Ward steps to the telephone, let us go upstairs on one last journey with our astral bodies and discover what Jeanette is doing. After Molly's departure, Jeanette stooped to pick up what Molly had left. She saw her own name, "Jeanette Barclay," and her address written on an envelope. She picked it up. It was dated: "Written December 28," and she saw that the package was filled with letters in envelopes similarly addressed in Neal Ward's handwriting. She dropped the letter on her dressing-table and began to undo her hair. In a few minutes she stopped and picked up another, and laid it down unopened. But in half an hour she was sitting on the floor reading the letters through her tears. The flood of joy that came over her drowned her pride. For an hour she sat reading the letters, and they brought her so near to her lover that it seemed that she must reach out and touch him. She was drawn by an irresistible impulse to her telephone that sat on her desk. It seemed crazy to expect to reach Neal Ward at midnight, but as she rose from the floor with the letters slipping from her lap and with the impulse like a cord drawing her, she saw, or thought she saw, standing by the desk, a part of the fluttering shadows, a girl—a quaint, old-fashioned girl in her teens, with—but then she remembered the dream girl her lover had described in the letter she had just been reading, and she understood the source of her delusion. And yet there the vision moved by the telephone, smiling and beckoning; then it faded, and there came rushing back to her memory a host of recollections of her childhood, and of some one she could not place, and then a memory of danger,—and then it was all gone and there stood the desk and the telephone and the room as it was.

She shuddered slightly, and then remembered that she had just been through two great nervous experiences—the story of her father's changed life, and the return of her lover. And she was a level-headed, strong-nerved girl. So the joy of love in her heart was not dampened, and the cord drawing her to the desk in the window did not loosen, and she did not resist. With a gulp of nervous fear she rang the telephone bell and called, "54, please!" She heard a buzzing, and then a faint stir in the receiver, and then she got the answer. She sat a-tremble, afraid to reply. The call was repeated in her ear, and then she said so faintly that she could not believe it would be heard, "Oh, Neal—Neal—I have come back."

The young man standing in the dimly lighted hall was startled. He cried, "Is it really you, Jeanette—is it you?"

And then stronger than before the voice said, "Yes, Neal, it is I—I have come back!"

"Oh, Jeanette—Jeanette," he cried.

But she stopped him with, "We must not talk any more—now, don't you know—but I had to tell you that I had come back, Neal." And then she said, "Good night." So there they stood, the only two people in the universe, reunited lovers, each with the voice of the other sounding in his ears. For Mr. Dolan was right. There are only two people in the world, and for these two lovers earth and the stars and the systems of suns that make up this universe were only background for the play of their happiness.

As Neal Ward came back to John Barclay from the telephone, the young man's face was burning with joy.

"Who was it?" asked Barclay.

The youth smiled bashfully as he said, "Well, it was Jeanette—she was calling up another number and I cut in."

"What did she say?" asked her father.

"Oh, nothing—in particular," replied Neal.

Barclay looked up quickly, caught the young man's abashed smile, and asked, "Does she know you're here?"

"No, she thinks I'm at the office."

Barclay rose from his chair, and limped across the room, calling back as he mounted the stair, "Wait a minute."

It was more than a minute that Neal Ward stood by the fire waiting.

And now, gentle people, observe the leader of the orchestra fumbling with his music. There is a faint stir among the musicians under the footlights. And you, too, are getting restless; you are feeling for your hat instinctively, and you for your hat-pins, and you for your rubbers, while Neal Ward stands there waiting, and the great clock ticks in the long silence. There is a rustle on the stairs, at the right, and do you see that foot peeping down, that skirt, that slender girlish figure coming down, that young face tear-stained, happy, laughing and sobbing, with the arms outstretched as she nears the last turn of the stairs? And the lover—he has started toward her. The orchestra leader is standing up. And the youth, with God's holiest glory in his face, has almost reached her. And there for an instant stand Neal and Jeanette mingling tears in their kisses, for the curtain, the miserable, unemotional, awkward curtain—it has stuck and so they must stand apart, hand in hand, devouring each other's faces a moment, and then as the curtain falls we see four feet close together again, and then—and then the world comes in upon us, and we smile and sigh and sigh and smile, for the journey of those four feet is ended, the story is done.