Mr. Ffrench responded to the indirect appeal with more than usual irritation, his level gray eyebrows contracting.

"We ought to have better drivers. Why do you not get better men, Bailey? You wanted to go into this racing business; you said the cars needed advertising. My brother always attended to that side of the factory affairs, while he lived, with you as his manager. Now it is altogether in your hands. Why do you not find a proper driver?"

"Perhaps my hands are not used to holding so much," mused Bailey unresentfully. "A man might be a good manager, maybe, and weak as a partner. It isn't the same job. But a first-class driver isn't easy to get, Mr. Ffrench. There's Delmar killed, and George tied up with another company, and Dorian retired, all this last season; and we don't want a foreigner. There's only one man I like—"

"Well, get him. Pay him enough."

Bailey hunched himself together and crossed his legs.

"Yes, sir. He's beaten our cars—and others—every race lately, with poorer machines, just by sheer pretty driving. He drives fast, yet he don't knock out his car. But there's a lot after him—there's just one way we could get him, and get him for keeps."

"And that?"

"He's ambitious; he wants to get into something more solid than racing. If we offered to make him manager, he'd come and put some new ideas, maybe, into the factory, and race our cars wherever we chose to enter them. I know him pretty well."

The proposition was advanced tentatively, with the hesitation of one venturing in unknown places. But Ethan Ffrench said nothing, his gray eyes fixed on the hearth.

"He understands motor construction and designing, and he's been with big foreign firms," Bailey resumed, after waiting. "He'd be useful around; I can't be everywhere. What he'd do for us in racing would help a whole lot. It's very well to make a fine standard car, but it needs advertising to keep people remembering. And men like to say 'my machine is the same as Lestrange won the Cup race with.' They like it."

"I don't know," said Mr. Ffrench slowly, "that it is dignified for the manager of the Mercury factory to be a racing driver."

"The Christine cars are driven by the son of the man who makes them," was the response. "Some drive their own."

"The son of the man who makes them," repeated the other. He turned his face still more to the quivering fire, his always severe expression hardening strangely and bitterly. "The son—"

The girl rose to draw the crimson curtains before the windows and to push an electric switch, filling the room with a subdued golden glow in place of the late afternoon grayness. Her delicate face, as she regarded her uncle, revealed most strongly its characteristic over-earnestness and a sensitive reflection of the moods of those around her. Emily Ffrench's childhood had been passed in a Canadian convent, and something of its mysticism clung about her. As the cheerful change she had wrought flashed over the room, Mr. Ffrench held out his hand in a gesture of summons, so that she came across to sit on the broad arm of his chair during the rest of the conference, her soft gaze resting on the third member.

"My adopted son and nephew having no such talents, we must do the best we can," Mr. Ffrench stated, with his most precise coldness. "Being well-born and well-bred, he has no taste for a mechanic's labor or for circus performances with automobiles in public. Who is your man, Bailey?"

"Lestrange, sir. You must have heard of him often."

"I never read racing news."

"I read ours," said Bailey darkly. "We've been licked often enough by him. And he's straight—he's one of the few men who'll stop at the grand-stand and lose time