built the Maple Street Bridge, and the Chickering Valley Railroad. A prairie town was named after him, which might become a stately city, and did not. Someone in the East, speaking technically, "wrecked" the Chickering Valley Railroad for private reasons, rendered the stock of it for the time as waste winter leaves. The elder Hennion died poor and philosophical.

"Never mind, Dick. He [the wrecker], he'd have gone to hell anyhow. That's a cheerful thought. When old Harvey Ester-brook died, he told his boys he hoped they'd have as much fun spending his money as he did making it, but they didn't. They worried it away. They'd've disappointed him there, only he was dead. It's mighty good luck to be young, and I wish I had your luck. But I've had a good time." Such was "Rick" Hennion's philosophy.

Young Hennion had been his father's close companion those last seven years, and learned of him the mechanics of engineering and the ways of business, how men talked and what they meant by it. He stepped into the inheritance of a known name and a wide acquaintance. He knew everyone on Bank Street, merchants and lawyers, railroad men up and down the State, agents and promoters, men in grain and lumber, iron and oil, and moreover some thousand or more men who handled pick and shovel, saw and trowel. He recognised faces brown with earth-dust, black with coal, white with the dust of grain. Men of one class offered him contracts, somewhat small at first; men of another class seemed to look to him as naturally for jobs; his life stretched before him a sweep of fertile country. Among the friendliest hands held out to him were Marve Wood's.

Wood came to Port Argent after the War, a man in middle life, but he seemed to have been there before. He seemed to have drifted much about the continent. It was a common type in Port Argent, so many citizens, one found, had drifted in their time. He had a kind of land agency at one time, and an office on Hancock Street, and presently became one of those personages little noted by a public looking to oratory, but certainly members of party committees, sometimes holders of minor offices. Such a man's power, if it grows, has a reason to account for the growth, a process of selecting the man most fitted to perform a function. If one wished to know anything intimate about the city, what was doing, or about to be done, or how the Council would vote, or any one thread in the tangled interests of scores of men, Marve Wood appeared to have this information. His opinion was better—at least better informed—than most opinions. For some reason it was difficult not to be on good terms with him.

Port Argent concluded one day that it had a "boss." It was suggested in a morning paper, and people talked of it on the street. Port Argent was interested, on the whole pleased. It sounded metropolitan. Someone said, "We're a humming town." Real estate at auction went a shade higher that morning, as at the announcement of a new hotel or theatre contracted for. The hardware man from the corner of Hancock Street said:

"Wood, I hear you're a boss."

"That's it. Fellow told me so this morning. I threw him out of the window and asked him how to spell it. Been figuring on that ever since."

"Well, I've been reading the New York papers, and they do say down there it ought to be spelled with a brick."

"Well—now—I learned to spell that way, but the teacher used a shingle mostly. 'Marvin Wood, spell buzzard,' says he, and splits his shingle on my head for dropping a 'z.' Yes, sir, that was fifty years ago, and now every time I write a tough word I duck my head to dodge the shingle, and spell it wrong. I don't know. Maybe a brick would 've been better. Want anything in particular?"

The hardware man wanted to know about the new Third-ward schoolhouse, and when and where to put in a bid for supplying it twelve dozen indestructible desks.

The sparrows in the dark maples in front of Hennion's windows were quiet, because the night was come, wherein no sparrow may quarrel. The issues of their commonwealth were settled by being forgotten. Doubtless, many a sparrow would keep the perch he had pre-empted unrighteously, and in the morning the issues be different, and the victims find their neighbours overnight had tired of their wrongs. Even one's neighbours' sins are not interesting forever, let alone their wrongs.

Hennion dressed and went out, and presently was walking on Lower Bank Street past the broken-up street and the piles of paving brick.

The Champney house was one of those houses that cannot do otherwise than contain four rooms to the floor, each square, high-ceilinged, and furnished more with an eye to the squareness and high ceilings than to the people who might come to live in it, not so angled and elevated. Hennion was not impressionable, but it seemed to him dimly that Camilla ought to sit on a different kind of chair. The house was heavy with the spirit of another generation, as if effectual life in it had stopped short years before. The furniture in the parlour had an air of conscious worth; the curtains hung reminiscently; Webster, Clay, and Quincy Adams occupied gilded frames and showed star-smitten foreheads.

Through the open door across the hall Hennion could see the big white head of Henry Champney in the lamplight, and knew where Miss Eunice sat primly with her knitting and gold-rimmed glasses.

The rush of the day's work was still ringing in his mind, the sense of the flexibleness of men and events, the absence of all form among them, or attitude, or repose. The Champney house with its inmates, except Camilla, seemed to have petrified at its point of greatest dignity.

Camilla said: "You haven't heard a word I've been saying, and it's important!"

Camilla was the second generation to possess the gift of feeling the importance of the immediate occasion. Fair maids are common enough, and yet most of them are extraordinary. But Camilla had the shining eyes, and lift of thick dark hair away from the forehead, that to elderly people recalled Henry Champney of long ago. She had the same intensity and readiness of belief. The manner in which that man of distinction would wrap small issues in the flag of the Republic, and identify a notion of his own with a principle of the Constitution, used to astonish even the constituency which voted him a giant. She seemed to Hennion not less apart from the street than Henry Champney, Miss Eunice, and their antiquities. She belonged to a set of associations that should not be mixed up with the street. In the street, in the clear light and grey dust, men and ideas were shaped to their uses. But Camilla's presence was to him a kind of vestal college. At least, it was the only presence that ever suggested to his mind things of that nature, symbols and sacred fires, and half-seen visions through drifting smoke.

He was contented now to wait for the revelation.

"Have you lots of influence really?" she said. "Isn't it fine! I want you to see Mr. Aidee. He's coming here to-night."

The revelation was unpleasant. He felt his latent dislike for Aidee grow suddenly direct. When it came to introducing the incongruities of the dusty street and blatant platform to the place where his few silent ideals lay glimmering; bringing Camilla to march in the procession where chants were played on fife and drum, and the Beatitudes painted on the transparencies, so to speak—it was unpleasant.

"I'd rather not see him here."

"But he's coming!"

"All right. I shan't run away."

"And he has asked my father——"

Hennion disliked Aidee to the point of assassination.

"Oh, Camilla!" he broke in, and then laughed. "Did he ask Miss Eunice to come in, too?"

The prospect had its humours—the guilelessness of the solemn preparation to sweep him into the fold with ceremony, with peals of Champney oratory and the calamitous approval of Miss Eunice. It might turn out a joke, and Camilla might be persuaded to see the joke. She sometimes did; that is, she sometimes