Gods Men

7

CANDACE FELT THAT WILLIAM was annoyed. He stooped to kiss her as usual but she was sensitive to his mood after these years of marriage and she saw a wintry stillness gathered about his heavy brows and firm mouth. When he spoke his voice was formal.

“I am sorry to be late.”

“Are you late?” She yawned nicely behind her hand. “Then I’m late, too. I was tired when I came home from the matinée.”

“Was the play good?”

“You wouldn’t think so.”

She rose from the chaise longue where she had been drowsing and looked from the window. Far below the vast park lay in shadows, pricked with lights. “I do hope the children are home. Nannie keeps them out too late. She is a fiend for fresh air.”

“There was a strong draft along the hall from the nursery door and so I suppose they are home,” William replied.

“Why do you think her first impulse upon entering a room is to open the windows?”

She asked the useless question while she was pulling on the satin slippers she had kicked off when she threw herself down. William seated himself in a chair and took his characteristic pose, his small dark hands gripped together, his legs, long and thin, crossed. Whatever the fashions for men, he wore his favorite gray, dark with a faint pinstripe, and his tie was dark blue. He did not answer his wife. This, too, was usual. Candace asked many questions she did not expect to have answered.

They were the queries of her idle mind. He had once given them thought until he discovered them meaningless.

She straightened her skirt and sauntering to her dressing table she picked up a brush and began smoothing out her short curls. Something was wrong but if she waited William would tell her. It might be anything, perhaps that he did not like the odor of food floating upstairs from the basement kitchen. The maids left the doors open in spite of her orders. Perhaps it was only while watching her as she brushed her hair he was reminded that she had decided to have her hair cut against his wishes.

“I had a letter from my father today,” William said abruptly.

“I thought something was wrong,” she said, not turning around but seeing him very well in the mirror. His face, always ashen, was no more so than usual. Something in his Chinese childhood, a doctor had said, perhaps the dysentery when he was four, had left his intestines filled with bacteria now harmless but more numerous than they should be.

“They have decided to take their furlough, after all,” he said.

She went on brushing her hair, watching his face. “That’s good news, isn’t it? I have never seen your father, and the boys have never seen even your mother.”

He frowned and the thick dark brows which always gave his face such somberness seemed to shadow and hide his deep-set eyes. “It is a bad time for me, nevertheless. I’d just decided to launch the new paper at once instead of waiting until spring.”

She whirled around. “Oh, William, you aren’t going to start something more!”

“Why not?”

“But we don’t see anything of you as it is!”

“I shan’t need to work as long hours as I did with the others. I’ve made my place.”

“But why, when we’re making money? You sacrifice yourself and us for nothing, darling!”

She let the brush fall to the floor and flew to his side and dropped on her knees, leaning her elbows on his lap and beseeching him. “I have always to take the boys everywhere without you. All last summer at the seashore you only came down for week ends, and scarcely that! It isn’t right, William, now when they’re beyond being babies. I didn’t say anything when you were getting started, but today, just when I was thinking we might go to the theater sometimes together!”

He was entirely conscious of her beautiful face so near his, and he would have given much to be able to yield himself to her but he could not. Some inner resistance kept him even from her. He did not know what it was, but he felt it like an iron band around his heart. He could not give himself up to anyone, not even to his sons. He longed to play on the floor, to roll on the carpet as Jeremy did with his little daughters, but he could not. He was most at ease when he sat behind his great desk in the office giving orders to the men whom he employed.

“I went to the theater with you only last week,” he reminded her.

“But that was an opening night and you know what people go to that for — to see and be seen. I want us just to go sometimes all by ourselves, and only for the play.”

He did not enjoy the theater but he had never told her so. He could never forget that it was only a play. No stage excitement could reach him when he was fed daily by the excitement of his own life, his secret power which he felt growing beneath the power of the printed words he set upon his pages. He alone chose those words. What he did not want people to know he did not allow to be printed. They learned only what he selected. Sometimes, meditating upon his responsibility, he felt himself chosen and destined for some power over men which he had not yet reached. He had been reared in Calvinism and predestination, but in his rebellion against his childhood he had rejected all that his father taught him. He had become almost an atheist while he was in college. Now he was made religious by his own extraordinary success. In the few years since he had put out the first of his newspapers, their sales had soared into millions. Yet he was not satisfied. Even now, traveling upon a train, he could feel vaguely hurt that on every other seat there should be lying the crumpled sheets of a paper thrown away. People ought to keep what he had so carefully made. Then his mood changed to pride. There were two of his papers to one of any other. Such colossal success meant something. There was a God, after all — and predestination.

“What are you thinking about?” Candace asked.

The question slipped from her tongue and she wanted it back instantly but it was too late. William disliked to be asked what he was thinking about. It was an intrusion and she knew now that he guarded himself even from her. It had taken her time to learn this and meantime she had wept a good deal alone. Tears, she had now learned, only irritated him. She shed no more of them.

“No — don’t answer me,” she said and impulsively she put her crossed fingers on his lips.

He took her hands rather gently, however, and did answer her. “I was thinking, Candy, that it is a great responsibility for one man to know that he feeds the minds — and the souls — of three million people.”

“Three million?”

“That is the number of our readers today. Rawlston gave me the last figures just before I came home. A year from now he says it will be twice that number. I suppose I am worth more than a million dollars, now.”

She was used to her father’s joking, “A millionaire? Nothing to it. Just keep ridin’ high and never look down.”

“You’ve made a great success, William.” She was not at all sure that this was the right thing to say and with his next words she knew it was not.

“I’m not thinking only in terms of personal success. It is easy to be successful here in America. Anyone with brains can make money.”

“But you do like money, William.” Her sense of being wrong compelled her to justify what she had said. Besides, it was true. In his own way William valued money far more than she did or ever could.

“It is only common sense to have money.” His voice was dry, his eyes severe and gray. “Without it one is hamstrung. There is no freedom without money.”

She remembered something she had heard her father once say. “A man needs enough room to swing a cat in.” Room, that was what money gave. A big house to live in, months in which to idle beside the sea, to live winter in summer and summer in winter, to buy without asking the price.

“Yet you don’t seem to enjoy life very much, William,” she said rather painfully. She had a profound capacity for enjoyment without a sense of guilt. Her father had frankly enjoyed getting rich and he distrusted all charities. She teased him sometimes by saying that he had become a Christian Scientist so that he could ignore the sufferings of others.

He had grinned and refused to be teased. “Maybe you’re right, daughter. Who knows why we do anything?”

Then he had turned grim. “If I see somebody starving, with my own eyes, I’ll feed ’em. I won’t pay out good cash for what I don’t see. Ten to one they’re lazy. If they hustled like I did. …”

Even going to church, while a social duty, had nothing to do with giving his money to strangers. Roger Cameron had cultivated no conscience in his children and Candace had grown up believing that pleasure was her normal occupation, once the dinner was planned and the children cared for. But no pleasure she devised could coax William from himself, or whatever it was that he dwelled upon in his soul. A ball which she planned as happily as a child might plan a birthday party fretted him with detail. A dish badly served spoiled his dinner. A servant who was not well trained — but of servants she would not think. He demanded of those in his service a degree of obedience and respect and outward decorum which had made her wretched until her father had found her crying one day. He had a way of coming to see her alone when he knew William was at his office. He took a cab and came all the way from Wall Street to arrive at three o’clock in the afternoon or at eleven o’clock in the morning.

On one such a visit he said, after he had inquired as to the cause of the tears his shrewd eyes had seen in spite of powder and even a dash of rouge, “You can’t find Americans who’ll give William the service he wants. We don’t respect ourselves enough yet. We’ve always got to be showing that we’re independent and don’t have to obey anybody. Besides, we’re too honest. When we hate anybody we act ugly. You hire your house full of English, Candy — they can act nice while they’re stirrin’ up poison for you. An English servant can polish your shoes as though he loved it. Of course he don’t.”

So she had filled the house with English servants, and a butler and a housekeeper kept their eyes upon William, the master.

“I don’t know that life is merely to be enjoyed,” William now said.

She was still crouching beside him. Idly she had taken one of his hands and playing with the fingers, she noticed the strange stiffness of his muscles.

“What’s life for?” she asked, not expecting an answer. “I don’t know, I don’t suppose anyone does, exactly. We’re here, that’s all.”

“It is for something more than amusement.” He disliked her playing with his hand and he drew it away, ostensibly to light a cigarette.

She felt his dislike and got to her feet gracefully, took his head between her hands and kissed his forehead.

“Poor darling, you’re so serious.”

“I don’t need your pity.”

“Oh, no, William, I didn’t mean that. Only, I enjoy life so much.”

She drew back and met the hurt look she feared. Why could she never learn how easily wounded he was? She cried out. “How silly we are to keep talking about nothing when you haven’t even told me your real news! When are your father and mother coming?”

He was relieved to be able to withdraw from her. “I had a cable this afternoon. They sailed the thirteenth on an Empress ship.”

“Then in a fortnight—”

“More or less. Just when I shall be busiest.”

“Never mind, I’ll look after them. Dad has time, too, now he’s retired enough to stop away from the office if he likes. And there’s Jeremy and Ruth—”

“I shall need Jeremy.”

Of the young men with whom he had begun the paper only Jeremy was left. One by one the others had deserted him. Martin Rosvaine had gone into the production of motion pictures and Blayne into the State Department with aspirations for an ambassadorship. He had not missed these two, but he had been sorry when Seth James quarreled with him, for he valued Seth’s brilliant and effervescent mind, the ideas which poured forth like sparks from a rocket. Most of them were useless, but he watched the scintillating performance because there were always one or even two or three ideas upon which he seized. They had made a good pair, for Seth’s weakness was his inability to discriminate between good ideas and foolish ones, and the paper would have been bankrupt had he been given authority. For that reason, William told himself, he had been compelled to keep control in his own hands even to the extent of buying up stock. Jeremy, of course, had never been a threat. He worked when he wished and William had learned to hire an understudy for him. But even yet he missed Seth, who had left him in anger and still refused to communicate with him.

The quarrel had been over a small matter, a difference of opinion so common to them that William had not troubled even to be polite. He had merely thrown abrupt words over his shoulder one night when they were all working long past midnight. Seth had said something about a story of some long-orphaned children in a foster home on a Pennsylvania farm. The farmer had lost his temper at a boy — he was still a boy, though a man in years — and the boy in terror and self-defense had rushed forward with a pitchfork, which had pierced the farmer’s leg. The wound was slight but the farmer had hacked the boy with an ax with which he was chopping wood and the boy had bled to death within an hour. There had been scandal enough so that Seth had gone impetuously to the scene himself to check the copy he was reading, and had come back flaming with anger at the conditions he found in the farmhouse: two half-starved grown girls, both mentally retarded, and a fat cruel old woman, and the boy hastily buried without anyone coming to investigate. The farmer lay in bed and babbled about self-protection. Seth had routed out police and they in turn had produced a thin frightened woman who claimed that she was only an employee of the organization that had placed the children and that she did not know whether there were any relatives. In the end the local publicity had spread to reach Ohio, whereupon Clem Miller of all people had come to Pennsylvania to see what was going on. He had taken the two girls away with him and had told the police that the place was not fit for any children, big or little.

To Seth Clem had said with furious zeal, “I hope you’ll tell William to make a real spread of this. Everybody in America ought to know about it. It’s a strange and pitiful thing — this was my grandfather’s place. He hung himself in that barn because he was too softhearted to get a neighbor off a farm — mortgage was called in. I came here myself when I was a kid, not knowing. These people were here already. I ran away — wanted all the kids to come with me, but only one would come.”

“It’s nothing but a local mess and of no significance,” William had said upon getting Clem’s message.

“But the boy’s death is significant,” Seth had insisted. “The very fact that orphaned children could be farmed out like that to such people, and no one care—”

“Well, no one does care,” William had retorted.

Seth’s answer had taken a long moment in coming and William, his mind upon his editorial, had not turned around. It came at last.

“You don’t care, that’s a fact,” Seth had said in a still voice. “You don’t care about anybody, damn you!”

He stalked to the door. “I’m not coming back here.”

“Don’t be foolish,” William said.

He had been very angry, nevertheless, when Seth walked out of the office. During the sleepless night in which he told Candace nothing except that the bread sauce on the pheasant he had eaten for dinner had not agreed with him, he made up his mind that when Seth came back in the morning he would ignore the whole matter. Otherwise he would have to fire him. But Seth did not come back. William had never heard from him since, but so far as he knew he was doing nothing of any use. He had backed two or three quixotic magazines, none of which were succeeding. Fortunately for Seth his father, old Mackenzie James, and Aunt Rosamond, too, had left him plenty of money. When William thought of their quarrel, as he often did, he was still convinced that he was right. A local murder in itself was not important. But William could never forget a wound and Seth had wounded him deeply. This was important.

He felt himself misunderstood; of all his men he thought that Seth had understood him best. For William did not think only of himself. All that he did, his monstrous effort, his tireless work, was, he believed, to make people know the truth. Why else did he scan every photograph that was to be printed, why read and read again the galley proofs except that he might make sure that the people were given truth and nothing but the truth? He had tried to say something like this to Seth one day and Seth had laughed.

“Truth is too big a word for one man to use,” Seth had declared. “For decency’s sake, let’s say truth as one man sees it.”

To this William had not replied. It was not truth as he or anyone else saw it. Surely truth was an absolute. It was an ideal, it was what was right, and right was another absolute. Facts had little to do with either. Facts, William often declared to his young subeditors, were only trees in a forest, useless until they were put to use, bewildering until they were chosen, cut down, and organized. The policy was to establish what was right, as a man might build his house.

“Our materials are facts,” William often said to his staff, looking from one tense young face to the other. The men admired him for his success, swift and immense. He was upheld by their admiration and only Seth had insisted on seeing the confusion behind their eyes. “When we know what we want to prove, we go out and find our facts. They are always there,” William said.

After Seth had deserted him, for to William, it could be called nothing but desertion, he had only Jeremy of the old gang. The rest of his huge staff was made up of many young men, whose names he was careful to remember if they were executives. To the others he paid no heed. They came and went and he judged them by the pictures they sent in and the copy they wrote. His young subeditors made up the paper, but he himself was the editor-in-chief, and mornings were hideous if he did not approve what they had done. For he must approve. No one went home unless he did — no one except Jeremy, whom he could not control. Jeremy alone at midnight put his hat on the side of his head and took up his walking stick. He would always be a little lame, and he made the most of his limp when he went into William’s office.

“Good night, William, I’ve had enough for today.”

William never answered. Had Jeremy not been the son of Roger Cameron he would have thrown him out and closed the door.

“Ruth and I will take care of your parents,” Candace was saying. “They’ll stay here, I suppose?”

“I suppose so,” William replied. He rose. “I shall have to get back to the office tonight, Candace. We’d better have dinner at once.”

Left alone after dinner, Candace put the two boys to bed, annoying the nurse Nannie by this unwanted help. The house was so silent afterward that she went to her own room and turned on all the rose-shaded lights and lay down to read, and then could not read. Instead she thought about William, whom she loved in spite of her frequent disappointment in their life together. She was not a stupid woman, although her education had been foolish, as she now knew. A finishing school and some desultory travel were all she had accomplished before her wedding day, and since then her life had been shaped around William’s driving absorption in the newspapers. She could not understand this absorption. Her father had worked, too, but only when it was necessary. Other people worked for him and he fired them when they did not do what he told them. A few hours in his offices sufficed to bring the money rolling in from hundreds of stores all over the country. It would have been so pleasant if William had been willing to go into the Cameron Stores, but this he had refused to do. She did not know what he really wanted. When they were married she supposed he wanted only to be rich, for of course only rich men were successful. Yet he could have been rich almost at once had he taken the partnership her father had later offered him.

Thus she discovered that he wanted something beyond money. Yet what more was there than a handsome and comfortable home, a wife such as she tried to be and really was, wasn’t she, and dear, healthy boys? One day, soon after they were married, in those days when she still thought that she could help him, she had said she thought his picture papers were childish and he had replied coldly that most people were childish and his discovery of this fact had given him the first idea for his papers.

“I like people and you hate them,” she had then declared in one of her flashes.

“I neither like them nor hate them,” he had replied.

Yet she believed that he loved her, and she knew she loved him. Why, she did not fully know. Who could explain a reason for love? Seth James had once wanted her to marry him. Since they were children he had talked about it, and Seth was good to the soul of him, kind and honest — yet she could not love him.

Surely it was strange not to know William better after years of marriage. She knew every detail of his body, his head, nobly shaped, but the eyes remote and deep under the too heavy brows; a handsome nose William had, and a fine mouth except that it was hard. His figure was superb, broad-shouldered, lean, tall, but when he was naked she looked away because he was hairy. Black hair covered his breast, his arms, his shoulders and legs. She disliked the look of his hands, though she loved him. Yet how little love revealed! What went on in his mind? They were often silent for hours together. What did he long for above all? It was not herself, nor even the two boys, though he had been pleased that his children were boys. He did not care for girls, and this she had not understood until one day Ruth had told her that in Peking the Chinese always felt sorry for a man when his child was born a girl. It was a sign of something unsuccessful in his house. No matter how many sons a Chinese had he always wanted more.

“But William isn’t Chinese,” she had told Ruth, making a wry face.

Ruth had given her pretty laugh. Then she had shaken her head rather soberly. “He’s not really American, though, Candy.”

What was really American? Jeremy was American, and Ruth had adapted herself to him, copying even his speech. They were quite happy since they had the two girls. Ruth had been absurdly grateful when Jeremy seemed really to prefer girls.

She loved Jeremy with her whole tidy little being and had no thought for anyone else, except William. William she was proud of and afraid of, and the only quarrel she had with Jeremy was when she asked him not to make William angry. Jeremy, of course, was afraid of nothing, not even of William.

Yet William loved his country. He was capable of sudden long speeches about America. Once at an office banquet to celebrate his first million readers, William had talked almost an hour and everybody listened as though hypnotized, even Candace herself. The big hotel dining room was still and suddenly she began to smell the flowers, the lilies and roses, on the tables, although she had not noticed their fragrance before. Words had poured out of William as though he had kept them pent in him. She heard the echoes of them yet.

“It is the hour of American destiny.

— We have been sowing and now we are about to reap.

— I see the harvest in terms of the whole world.

— The world will listen to our voices, speaking truth.

— We are young but we have learned in our youth to control the forces of water and air — the forces which are locked into ore and coal.

— Old countries are dying and passing away. England is weak with age, an ancient empire, her rulers grown tired. France is sunk in dreams and Italy slumbers. But we of America, we are awake. The name America will be heard among every people. It is our time, our hour. It is we who will write the history of the centuries to come. …”

Candace had listened, alarmed and half ashamed and yet fascinated. This was William, her husband!

That night in the silence of their own house she had been unusually silent. He had seemed exhausted, his face pallid as water under a gray sky, and he did not speak to her.

“You were very eloquent tonight, William,” she had said at last, because something was necessary to be spoken between them. “I suppose your preacher father is somewhere in you, after all.”

“I wasn’t preaching,” he had said harshly. “I was telling the truth.”

At this moment the telephone rang upon the small rosewood table beside her bed and, lifting the receiver, she heard her father’s nasal voice.

“William?”

“William is at the office, Father,” she told him. “There’s only me at home.”

He hesitated. “You in bed, Candy?”

“Not really. I’m just upstairs because I don’t like being downstairs alone.”

“Maybe I’ll come around. Your mother’s got a sick headache and she’s gone to sleep.”

“Do, Father. I’ll come down and be waiting.”

Such visits at night were not unusual. Her father liked to walk in darkness when the city streets were empty, and once or twice a month he rang the doorbell and when the door was opened stood peering doubtfully into the hall. “William here?”

It was always his first question, though why Candace did not know, for sometimes he came in whether William were home or not, to stay a moment or an hour. He had a delicacy which told him, his foot upon the threshold, whether his visit was opportune.

Tonight she was more than usually pleased, for she was in a mood to talk and there was no one with whom she could talk more easily than with her father. Her mother was well enough when it came to the matter of servants and children but tonight she wanted to talk about something more, although she did not know exactly what.

When the doorbell rang she hastened downstairs to open the door herself, for the maids were asleep. Her father stood upon the big door mat, looking gray and cold and yet somehow cheerful, the tip of his long nose red and his eyes small and keen.

“This is nice,” he said as she took off his overcoat. “I feel in the need of a little light conversation. It looks like rain and my knees are stiff.”

“You shouldn’t be walking on such a night,” she scolded with love.

“I shan’t yield my life to my knees,” he said.

The fire was red coals in the living-room grate and he took the tongs from her. He was skillful at fires, manipulating the live coals under the fresh fuel and coaxing a flame from the least of materials. It was one of his pet economies, left over from the days when as a child he had picked up coal from the railroad yards in a Pennsylvania mining town.

When the fire was blazing he sat down, rubbing his hands clean on his white silk handkerchief. “Well, how’s tricks?”

“Oh, we’re all well,” she replied. “Willie is on the honor roll at school. William was quite pleased. The real news is that William’s parents are coming from China.”

“I thought they’d decided to stay for another year.”

“So did I.”

“It’s the old lady, I imagine,” he said thoughtfully and gazed into the fire. “I suppose William’s glad?”

Candace laughed. “He seems rather annoyed.”

Roger Cameron liked to hear his daughter laugh. He looked up and smiled. It was a pleasant moment, the big room shadowed in corners and lit here by the fire and the lamp. She looked pretty in a rose-colored wool dressing gown, pretty and maybe happy, too. For a while after her marriage he had wondered if she was happy and them had decided she could be, mainly because she had a fine digestion and no ambitions. He had taken care in her education that she should not be placed in the atmosphere of ambitious women. There were such women in the Stores, and none of them, he believed, were happy. His secretary, Minnie Forbes, whom he had employed since she was twenty-one, was devoured with dry unhappiness, perhaps because Minnie would have been shocked to know that she was in love with her employer. Roger knew very well that she was and was grateful for her ignorance. He himself loved his wife in a mild satisfactory way, and had no desire to love anyone else. The brief months when as a young man he had been passionately in love with her he remembered as extremely uncomfortable, for he could not keep his mind on his business. He had been relieved when he discovered that she was not the extraordinary creature his fancy had led him to imagine her, and then he had settled down to the homely and unromantic married love which he had enjoyed now throughout forty peaceful years. He and his wife were deeply attached, but she did not regret his business trips, and he enjoyed them with the single-minded pursuit of more business.

“William never did quite know what to do with his family,” he now said.

“Are they queer, Father?” Candace’s blue eyes were always frank. “I can’t seem to remember even his mother very well.”

“I suppose anybody that goes off to foreign countries is queer in a way,” he replied. “Ordinary folks stay at home. Still, they are always taking up collections in churches and all that. William’s father is no more than a preacher who goes beyond what’s considered his average duty. ‘Go ye into all the world,’ and so on. But nobody much takes it seriously, except a few. They’re always good men, of course.”

“And the women?”

“I don’t believe Mrs. Lane would have gone on her own hook. I suppose she went because he did. Not too much sympathy between them, as I remember.”

He did not want to tell his daughter that he remembered Mrs. Lane as a pushing sort of woman. Maybe she wasn’t. People often became pushing when they were with a rich man. He had got used to it. Anyway, it was all in the family now.

“Jeremy’s little Mollie is a cute trick,” he said, smiling.

“She is,” Candace agreed. “Ruth tells me she talks all the time. When she comes here she is shy and won’t say a word.”

“She talks to me if I’m by myself. It’s wonderful to watch the first opening of a child’s mind.”

“Ruth and I are going to have to look after Mother and Father Lane. William is working on a new paper.”

“What’s he want with more work?” Roger took out his pipe. He had not begun smoking until recently and he still felt strange with the toy. But he had wanted something to occupy his hands.

“The Duke of Gloucester knits,” he said, perceiving a gleam now in his daughter’s candid blue eyes. “That’s all very well for an Englishman. We American men aren’t up to it yet I don’t really like this smoking, but it takes time to fill the pipe and light it and it goes out a good deal. It’s all occupation.”

“What’s the matter with you American men?” Candace asked, her eyes bright, her mouth demure.

“An Englishman is never afraid of being laughed at,” Roger replied. “He just thinks the other fellow is a fool. But Americans still can’t risk anybody laughing at them. I can’t, myself. Tough as I am I couldn’t knit, even if I wanted to. I don’t want to, though.”

“You don’t want to smoke, either,” she mocked.

He grinned at her sheepishly and went on with his maneuvers while she watched, still ready to laugh. “I guess I like to play with fire,” he said when at last he was puffing smoke, his eyes watering. “What I like best is getting it ready and striking the match.”

“Oh, you.” She yawned softly. “No, I’m not sleepy. I keep worrying about what I’ll do with William’s parents. Why don’t you help me? Suppose they want to stay here in the house all winter?”

“Let them do what they want and you go your ways,” he replied. “Be nice to them and leave them free. That’s what most old folks want. Don’t worry yourself.”

“Didn’t you ever worry about anything?”

“Sure I did. When I was young I worried my stomach into a clothes wringer. One day a doctor said I’d be dead in a year. I made up my mind I wouldn’t. But I had to quit worryin’ my stomach. Lucky the Stores were on their feet. That was the time I knew Jeremy never would take over. Well, I didn’t need him, as it turned out, or anybody. It’s a great thing to be able to manage your own business. I kind of hoped once that William would come in, but it’s just as well. William is cut out for what he’s doing.”

“What do you think William really wants, Father?”

So seldom did she ask a serious question that he looked rather startled and put his pipe on the table to have it out of the way.

“What do you mean, Candy?”

“Well, we have lots of money.”

“It’s wonderful what he’s done.”

“But he doesn’t enjoy it. Even when we have a dinner party it seems he can’t enjoy it. It has to be more than a party, somehow. And there is no use taking a vacation. When we went to France last summer, he spent the whole time arranging for a European edition. I went around by myself until in Paris I met some of the girls I’d known in school.”

“William’s ambitious,” Roger said reluctantly.

“For what, Father?”

“I don’t believe he knows,” Roger said. “Maybe that’s what bothers him. He don’t know what to do with himself.”

There was something so astute in this that Candace laid it aside for further thought.

“I wish I could teach him how to play games and enjoy horseback riding.”

“He rides well enough.”

“He does everything well, and doesn’t care for any of it. I love him and I don’t understand him.”

There was a hint of fear in her voice; only a hint, but he did not want to hear it. He was getting too old for sorrow. He could not even read a sad book any more. When it began to get sad he shut it up. He had seen too much trouble that he could not help, or maybe he did not want to help.

“You don’t have to understand people,” he said in his driest tones. “There’s so much talk about understanding this and that nowadays. Most of the time nobody understands anything. If you love him, you don’t need to bother about understanding, I reckon. Just take him as he acts.”

He began to feel restless as he always did when he smelled trouble. He had a wonderful sense of smell for trouble and when he caught that acrid stench, however faint, he went somewhere else. So now, though he loved his daughter, he rose and put his cold pipe into his pocket.

“I guess I’ll be getting along home.” He bent over her and kissed her hair. “Don’t you worry, my girl. Just treat the old folks nice and let them do what they want.”

“Good night, Father, and thank you.”

He ambled out of the room and she sat a few minutes alone. She was shrewd in her naïve way and she knew his willful avoidance of trouble. But she was enough like him to sympathize with it. What he had said was comforting. It was easiest, after all, not to worry about understanding people, and surely easy just to love them, whatever they did, so long as they were not cruel in one’s presence. And William was never cruel to her or to the children. He had never whipped the boys, however impatient he became. Jeremy, in a flurry of wrath, could upturn the fluffy skirts of a small girl over his knee and give her a couple of paddles and then, his anger vented, turn her upright again and kiss her soundly. William did not kiss his sons, either. He never touched them.

Ah well, she was glad she loved him. Love, her father had said, was enough.

The moment William looked at his father as he came off the train, he knew that here was an old man come home to die. The sight and the knowledge stunned him. As always when he was moved he felt speechless. Ruth stood beside him and on the other side were Candace and Jeremy together. They had not brought the children because of the crowd and the late hour. The lights of the station fell upon his father’s white face and gaunt frame. He had grown a beard, but even its whiteness did not make the white face less pale. His mother was stouter and older, as strong as ever. It was she who saw them first and she who greeted them. He felt her firm kiss on his cheek.

“Well, William!”

“Yes, Mother.”

But he kept looking at his father. This old, old man, this delicate ghost, the dark eyes living and burning and the pale lips folded quietly together in the white beard! He took his father’s hand and felt it crumple into a few bones in his palm.

“Father—” he cried, and put his arms around his father’s shoulders. He turned to Jeremy. “You take care of them, Jeremy — the women and the — the baggage. I’m going to get my father out of this.”

“But he’s ever so much better,” his mother cried.

“He doesn’t look better to me,” William said. His lips felt stiff and he wanted to cry. He pulled his father away, his arm still about the thin old body. “Come along, Father. The car is here.” Why hadn’t his mother told him?

The chauffeur was standing at the open door of the car. William helped his father in and wrapped the rug warmly about his knees. “Drive straight home, Harvey,” he called through the speaking tube.

The heavy car swayed slowly into the traffic. William sat looking at his father. “How do you really feel?”

Dr. Lane smiled and looked no less ghostly. “You didn’t think I would look the same after all the years?”

It was the first time he had spoken and his voice was soft and high, almost like a child’s.

“But are you well?” Now that William was alone with his father he could control his unexpected tenderness.

“Not quite,” his father said.

He looked so patient, so pure, that William felt he saw him for the first time. To his own surprise he wanted to take his father’s hand and hold it, but he felt ashamed and did not.

“Have you seen the doctor?” He spoke again with his usual abruptness.

“Yes, that is why we left Peking so suddenly. He thought I should be examined here.” Dr. Lane’s smile was tinged with unfailing sweetness.

“What did he say it was?”

“It seems I have had sprue for a long time without quite knowing it. It destroys the red corpuscles, I believe.” Dr. Lane spoke without interest in his corpuscles.

William heard and made up his mind quickly. He would get the best man in the world on tropical diseases — send to London for him if necessary. He felt an imperious anger harden his heart. “I should have thought Mother would have noticed.”

“One doesn’t notice, I suppose, living in the same house for so many years,” his father replied. “I didn’t notice even myself. Tired, of course, but I thought I was just getting old.”

“You are going to rest now,” William commanded.

“That will be nice,” his father replied. His voice became fainter and fainter until with these words it was only a whisper. William took up the speaking tube. “Drive as fast as you can. My father is very tired.”

The car speeded under them smoothly. Dr. Lane leaned his head back against the upholstered seat and closed his eyes and seemed to sleep. William watched him in profound anxiety. He would get his own doctor tonight immediately after they reached home; he would be afraid to sleep unless somehow his father was fortified.

When the car drew up at the door he got out first and with the tenderness so strange to himself he helped his father up the steps and into the hall. The butler was waiting and took their hats and coats. At the foot of the great stairway he saw his father stand back and look up as though at a mountain he could not climb.

“I will carry you up,” William muttered.

“Oh no!” Dr. Lane gasped. “I shall be quite able in a moment.”

William did not hear him. In a daze of love such as he had never felt for any human creature, he lifted his father into his arms and, horrified at the lightness of the frame he held, he mounted the stairs. The old man, feeling his son’s arms about him, gave himself up with a sigh and closed his eyes.

What befell William in the weeks that followed he was never able himself to understand. Its effects did not appear fully for many years. He seemed to be alone in the world with his father, and yet the dying saint was someone far beyond being only his father. For the time during which this presence was in his house William scarcely left his father’s room. He discerned with new perception that this spirit, preparing for departure, was ill at ease except alone and he was therefore brutal with his mother. He said to Candace and Ruth, “Mother must not come near him. It is your business to see that she is taken out of the house on any pretext you can think of.”

He bullied the American doctors cruelly, declaring them incompetent. He himself cabled to the great English specialist in tropical diseases, Sir Henry Lampheer, demanding his instant attendance. Under the roaring waves of the Atlantic Ocean this communication went on, hour after hour.

Sir Henry’s reply to William’s command was British and stubborn. HAVE CONSULTED WITH YOUR DR. BARTRAM. OBVIOUS MY SERVICES TOO LATE. STARVATION RESULT OF DESTROYED TISSUE. INJECTIONS MAY PROLONG LIFE.

William was imperious with the Englishman, SET YOUR OWN PRICE.

Sir Henry lost patience and his haughty irritation carried clear beneath the raging Atlantic tides. NO PRICE POSSIBLE FOR FOLLY OF LEAVING IMPORTANT PATIENTS HERE, ADVISE DEPENDING UPON YOUR OWN PHYSICIANS.

YOU PROPOSE TO LET MY FATHER DIE?

GOD DECREES, Sir Henry cabled, refusing blame, YOUR FATHER AN OLD MAN GRIPPED BY FATAL DISEASE.

MY FATHER COMES OF LONG-LIVED FAMILY, ALSO GREAT RESISTANCE OF SPIRIT, William retorted.

To this affirmation Sir Henry replied coldly, DIAGNOSIS CLEAR. INJECTIONS EMETINE, BLAND DIET, MILK, BANANAS, POSSIBLY STRAWBERRIES, CERTAINLY LIVER ESSENCE, ABSOLUTE REST, CONSULT BARTRAM.

The cables ticked themselves into hundreds of dollars, and after their futility William felt all the old rage of his boyhood mount into his blood. The damned superiority of the Englishman, the calm determination not to yield, the rigid heartless courtesy — he knew it all in Chefoo when the British Consul General’s son was at the top of the top form.

Blind with fury, William shut off the Atlantic Ocean and the British Isles and all the rest of the world. He was in his office, having left his father for an hour with two trained nurses, and Ruth to see that the fools did not neglect him. Now he called in his chief editor, keeping his finger on the electric button until Brownell came in on the run, his eyes terrified.

“Hold up the new dummy,” William ordered. “My father is very ill. I can’t get Lampheer to come over, he’s determined to let my father die — just another American, I suppose — typical British! I don’t know when I shall be back. I shall have to leave you in charge. If it’s absolutely essential call me, but if it’s not essential, I’ll fire you.”

“I’ll do my best, Mr. Lane.”

“Very well.”

William was putting on his overcoat and hat. Brownell sprang to his aid.

“Here, let me help.”

“Get back to your job,” William ordered, and hastened from the room.

Yet he knew Sir Henry was right. That was the worst of all, next to the fact of death itself. Now day by day he sat beside his father’s bed, silent in the silence of his house, having ordered the nurses to stay in his dressing room unless they were needed and forbidding any others except Dr. Bartram. Sir Henry would have been foolish to come and yet he ought to have set a price. Every man had his price and William could have paid it. His father was a man of importance, the father of William Lane, a rising power in America. It was an insult he would not forgive, and he added it to the mountain of insults he had taken in his boyhood. Sitting beside his dying father he brooded upon the mountain and how he would level it, by what means and with what purpose. Those tiny islands, clutching at half the world, those arrogant men sitting in their dinner coats at solitary tables in jungles, served by millions of dark men — it was monstrous. His country, his beautiful youthful America, despised and laughed at, even as he himself had been laughed at by stupid English boys who could not spell! In those days he had been ashamed of his father because he was only a missionary, but now that missionary was the father of William Lane. The missionary was lifted up out of his humility and poverty. He had become the father of a man whose first million was doubling itself.

Tears stung William’s eyes. Money could not delay by one hour the death of his father, even his. He leaned toward the bed and took his father’s hand in his own. The hands were not alike. He had his small dark hands from his mother. His father’s were big and bony, and now how thin and helpless.

“Father—” he whispered. For a moment he thought him dead.

But Dr. Lane was not dead. He turned his head slowly, the same nobly shaped head that he had given to his son when he begot him.

“Yes, William?” The voice was faint but clear.

“You know I am doing everything I can?”

“Yes, my son. … It is quite all right. … I must die, you know.”

“I can’t let you die.”

“That is very good of you, William. … I appreciate it. … To want me to live—”

“Because I need you, Father.”

The words broke from him and the moment he had spoken them he knew them true. He had never really talked with his father and now it seemed to him that to his father alone could he speak of himself and the immense restlessness that filled him day and night. Now that he had set up this vast successful machine that brought money rolling in whether he was there or not, then what next? Now that he had power, millions of people his, too, looking at the pictures he chose, reading the words he wrote or permitted to be written, what next?

“Father, if you leave me — if you really think—”

“I know God has told me.”

“Then tell me before you go — what am I to do?”

“Do?”

“With myself.”

He saw his father’s dark eyes open wide with final energy.

“William, you must listen to your own conscience. … It is the voice of God … in your breast. ‘Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth.’ All that you have — all your great gifts, my son … dedicate them to God. Oh God — I thank thee — thou hast — brought me to my son in time—”

The faint voice died away and the old man fell into sudden sleep as he did after the least exertion. He did not speak again.

William sat beside him through the hours. The nurses came and went, doing their duty. The doctor came, spoke a few words. “It can’t last, Mr. Lane. Any moment, I am afraid.”

William did not reply. That night, twenty minutes after midnight, his father without waking ceased to breathe.

Clem had plunged himself again into his own country. He had failed in China but he was not discouraged. Such was his faith in that which he believed. He had said very little to Henrietta about the brief visit to the shack in San Francisco, but she comprehended the refusal and perceived that as usual Clem had only been strengthened by it.

“Someday they’ll see I’m right, hon,” he told her. “They” were the powers, those who did not believe in his faith, the greedy, the selfish, the politicians, the small-minded. He did not hate, neither did he despise. Instead he was possessed by a vast patience, a mighty omniscience. He could wait.

Meanwhile he worked. He decided to open his largest and cheapest market in Dayton. Each of his markets had its own peculiar name. This one he called “People’s Choice.”

“I don’t want a chain name,” Clem said when Bump spoke of the advantages of a chain of markets all called by the same name. “I want people to think the markets are theirs. Each one must be different, suited to a town and its folks.”

People’s Choice was his first city market and he built it outside the city where land was cheap, at the end of a trolley line.

On the opening day Henrietta had come to help. Clem had lured thousands of people by his announcement of free foods on this first day. By ten o’clock the trolley cars were crowded beyond control and well-fed people were struggling to reach counters where loaves of bread, pounds of cake, and baskets of fruit were waiting to be given away. The day was clear and cool and through the great glass windows the sun poured over stacked counters and heaped bins. Clem had devised an effect at once modern and old-fashioned. Apples were piled upon the floor in corners, and bananas hung from the ceiling.

“Help yourselves, folks,” Clem shouted cheerfully. “Take a pumpkin home and make yourselves a pie. Here’s old-fashioned molasses — dip it up, folks! It’s bottling that makes it come high — five cents a dipper, folks! I bought it in N’Orleans for you — by the barrel, folks — and plenty. Here’s bread — take a loaf, and here’s butter from Wisconsin — straight from the farmers, and that’s why I can afford to give it away today. Tomorrow you’ll pay less for it than you pay in any store in the city. If anybody is hungry he can have a loaf free. Give and it shall be given unto you. Don’t take it if you’re not hungry, but if you’re hungry and can’t pay for it, we’ll always give it to you. No caviar here, folks, no fancy notions, just plain food straight from the people who raise it.”

In and out among the surging, staring people he wove his way, alert, smiling, his sandy head held high, his small blue eyes snapping and twinkling and seeing everything at once. He wore overalls of denim like his clerks, or “hands” as he called them, and his hands were men from anywhere, two Chinese boys who were working their way through college, a Negro he had seen in Louisiana and liked, Swedish farm boys from Minnesota. He had picked his men and trained them himself, saying that clerks from other stores were no good to him.

His business was unorthodox and filled with risk, and when a man became fearful because of small children and a nervous wife, he let him go and found the boys, the young who dared to be reckless. He would send Bump overnight to California or Florida to buy up carloads of cheap oranges, to West Virginia to sweep up a harvest of turnips that were overloading the market, to Massachusetts to bid for a haul of fish that threatened to bring down the price on New York markets. Wherever there was unwanted food, food about to be thrown away, as Maine farmers were about to throw away half their crop of potatoes last summer, Clem or Bump was there. Clem trusted no other to buy for him, since in the narrow margin of buying and selling lay his profits and in his profits was his ability to expand his markets and his faith. His heritage from his father was an invincible belief in goodness, not in the goodness of God to which his father had so persistently trusted, but in the goodness of man. Clem believed more profoundly than ever that with his stomach full any man preferred to be good. Therefore the task of the righteous, of whom Clem considered himself one, was to see that everybody had food.

In his hours of dreaming, for he did no work on Sunday and his markets were rigidly locked on that day, he gave himself up to still more huge fantasies about feeding all the hungry in the world. There in his ugly little house in New Point, Ohio, where he lived in complete happiness with Henrietta, he saw the people in China and India someday crowding to his markets. His failure with Sun Yatsen in San Francisco, his conviction of future success made his dreams the richer and more real.

He recalled the long journey he had made on foot from Peking to the sea. The old agony of the moment when he saw his parents and sisters murdered had softened and dimmed. Instead he remembered the winding cobbled roads of the country that tied the villages together, the dusty footpaths on either side of the cobbles, the fields green with new wheat in spring, with the tall sorghum corn in summer. Someday in those Chinese villages and market towns his foods would stand displayed.

People’s Choice promised, even this first day, to be instantly successful and Clem saw himself growing still richer. According to any rules he should not be getting so rich. He had no desire to be a millionaire like William, and he was almost ashamed of his mounting bank accounts. But he never gave money away. Some deep prejudice against organized charity, against packaged religions and vague idealism, made him keep his hands in his pockets. He gave to any man or woman or child who wore a ragged coat or who needed a doctor, and a few words scribbled on a torn scrap of paper or an old envelope provided food from his nearest market for anyone, from a hungry college student to a passing drunk or a springtime tramp. But he gave no large checks to soliciting treasurers and college presidents, and the churches, even of his home town, had come to look for no more from him than ten dollars dropped into the collection box at Christmas.

Bump, that cautious and careful young man, mindful of his college degree in economics and business management, warned him that sooner or later the organized food interests would attack him.

“You can’t go on underselling them without their trying to get your hide,” Bump warned. His relationship to Clem remained nebulous, profound though unexpressed. Clem was too young to be his foster father and he had never offered to be his brother. Bump was shrewd and he recognized in Clem a genius inexplicable. It was comprised of a daring that was absurd, a naïveté that was laughable, an ignorance that was almost illiterate, and out of daring, naïveté, and ignorance Clem succeeded in all he did. He had found a formula so simple that only a man as simple as himself could have proved it valid.

He declared it to gaping, staring thousands at noon this day of the opening of his new market. Six trumpeters, hired for the occasion, blew a frightful blast as the hour struck noon. The crowd, transfixed, paused to turn their heads toward the source of noise, and there in the center of the glittering brass, set upon a sort of balcony of boards rigged with ropes, they saw Clem in his overalls, with a megaphone.

“Folks!” he shouted. “This is more than just a market. It is a sign of what I believe in, a manifestation of my faith. ‘Faith is the evidence of things hoped for,’ the Bible says, and ‘the evidence of things unseen.’ Well, my hope is to see no more hunger, anywhere in the world. Food is the most important thing in the world. Food is one of a trinity with air and water. If I were President of the United States, which otherwise I am glad I am not, I would make bread and meat, milk and eggs, fruit and vegetables free to everybody. Then we would have no more war. It would be cheaper to feed people free like that than it would be to have a war, like what may come out of Asia someday if somebody don’t do something, because the people are starving.”

The people stood motionless, listening and wondering if he were mad. He took a deep breath and began again.

“Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t believe in charity, nor do we have to have the government doing this kind of thing. I’m not president, don’t expect to be, don’t want to be. But I’m doing what I can here, and you see it, don’t you? If it’s good, if it helps you, then all I ask is for you to believe in the idea. Thank you, folks — that’s all. And let me tell you that you’ll find free box lunches packed and ready for you down at the south end of the market. Ice cream is free for everybody, so’s milk and soda pop. Have a good time, folks!”

He was in a frenzy of happiness. To the people who milled around him during the afternoon he talked in a stream of advice, explanation, and remonstrance. “What you’ll find here is not all foods but just the essential foods and all cheap. I buy surpluses and that means whatever is in season and therefore cheapest. For instance, last winter when the big cold in the West was freezing cattle solid, I bought ’em that way and sold beef cheap. Price of meat came down right away. The beef was good, too. Freezing made it tender.

“Now here in this market, you won’t find cucumbers in January. But you’ll find mountains of them in summer when you want to be making your pickles. And I provide recipes, too. Where do I get them? From people like you. When you make something good write in and tell me about it. Look at that pile of leaflets there — take some — take a lot and give ’em to your friends. They’ll tell you what to do with cucumbers when they’re cheap and how to make jelly out of apple peelings and what not to throw into your garbage pails. Buy cheap, and don’t waste. We could feed the world on what we throw away — yep, that’s true, too. Nobody needs to starve — not anywhere in the world!”

People listened and laughed. “You sound like a preacher!”

Clem grinned his dry sandy grin. “Maybe I am — a new gospel I preach unto you. Nobody needs to be hungry.”

It was in the midst of such harangue in the late afternoon that he saw Henrietta standing in the far corner, very quiet in her dark blue suit and hat, and holding in her hands a yellow slip of paper. He was used to telegrams from his scouts scattered over the country, announcing a glut of oranges in the Southwest or corn in Indiana or truck-garden stuff in New Jersey. Such telegrams had to be heeded immediately and so he suddenly stopped talking and wove his way through the crowds, pushing them gently with his sharp elbows.

Face to face with Henrietta, he reached for the telegram which she gave him and then he saw that it was not what he thought.

The telegram was signed by Mrs. Lane. YOUR DEAR FATHER PASSED ON LAST NIGHT. FUNERAL WILL BE THURSDAY. PROSTRATED WITH GRIEF. WILLIAM WONDERFUL. LOVE MOTHER. Instantly Clem forgot the crowds and the great success of his day. There was no spot in the huge cheap building where he could draw his beloved aside into privacy. Glass and brick pillars gave only the illusion of shelter. But he made of himself a shelter for the tears now rising slowly to her eyes.

“Hon, you go to the hotel right away. I’ll send Wong with you. He has his little tin lizzie here. He’ll put you on the train for New York. If you need anything in clothes, you can buy it there — a black dress or so. I’ll be there tomorrow. I hate to have you alone tonight without me, but you’ll not blame me for that.”

“I wish I could have seen him just once,” Henrietta murmured, wiping her eyes behind the shelter of his shoulders. She was taller than he and yet just now he managed to stand a little above her upon a collapsed cardboard box. “I ought to have made William tell me. Ruth ought to have written — no, it was my own fault.”

For she had been cool to her parents when she got home because they had gone to William and had not thought of coming to her. No one had told her how ill her father was. Even the letters from her mother had not said he might die. She might have known when she had no letter from him, except that he seldom wrote to his daughters, and always to William. And Ruth would never face the worst.

“It’s a shame,” Clem muttered. “It does seem as though your folks could have sent word.”

“I may not see him even now,” she went on. “It would be just like William to go straight on with everything, as though no one else existed.”

“You go along quick,” he advised.

Stepping back he motioned to Wong, one of the Chinese students. He was a tall slender fellow from a town near Peking.

Clem said in Chinese, too low for anyone to hear or wonder at the strange tongue, “Wong, you take Mrs. Miller please to the hotel to get her bag and then to the railway station and buy her a Pullman ticket to New York on the first train. Her honored father has just died.”

Wong had heard of the venerable Dr. Lane, the mildest of missionaries, and he clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “The day of a father’s death is worse than any yet known in a person’s life,” he said gently.

He slipped off his white coat and changed to the one he wore outside the market. In half an hour Henrietta was on the way to the station in his old Ford car. Driving nimbly between the trolley cars and the traffic, Wong tried in his courteous fashion to comfort Henrietta by all that he had heard about Dr. Lane.

“We heard even in our town that it was your honored Old One who did not fear to approach that Devil Female King, the Empress, and tell her that she did ill to favor the Boxers. Again we heard, I from my father, since I was then very young, that when she came back again to the city, pretending that no evil had been done, your honored Old One would not follow the other foreigners to her feasts. He held himself aloof. Your Old One loved the people and not the rulers.”

“I have not seen my father for all these years,” Henrietta said. “Now I shall never see him again.”

“It was for our sakes that he cut himself off even from his own country,” Wong said in a heartbroken voice.

At the station he bought her tickets and a small basket of fruit. When he had seen her into her seat, had adjusted the window shade, had said good-by, he went outside on the platform and there he stood, his hat held against his breast until the train pulled out.

Henrietta had never been in William’s new home. Since she had sent no telegram to announce her coming, she took a cab and arrived at the door of the handsome house of gray stone, which stood between two smaller ones on upper Fifth Avenue. She rang the bell and the door was opened by an English manservant.

“I am Mr. Lane’s elder sister,” she said in her somewhat cold voice.

The man looked surprised and she saw that he had not known of her existence. “Please come in, Madame.”

He ushered her into a large room and disappeared, his footsteps silenced by thick carpets. Henrietta sat down in a deep chair covered with coral-colored velvet. The room astonished her. Gray, coral, smoke blue were mingled in velvet hangings and carpets. It was a room too soft, too rich, too opulently beautiful. Candace had thus surrounded the heavy furniture William had bought and which she disliked. In the center of the room upon a round mahogany table stood a vast Chinese bowl of silver-gray pottery, crackled with deeper gray veins. It was full of pale yellow roses. This then was the way William lived. He must be monstrously rich. Or perhaps it was only the way Candace lived, and perhaps it was she who was too rich.

Henrietta reflected upon William as she had remembered him in Peking. The memory was not dimmed by the image of what he now was. A sulky, dark-browed boy, who snarled when she spoke to him! Why had he been always unhappy? At school in Chefoo he had seldom spoken to her, even when they passed in the corridors. If her mother sent a message to them both in a letter to her, she had to send it to him in a note by a Chinese servant. Ruth had been too young to go away to school and so she had never seen the worst of William, for if he was unpleasant at home he was unbearable at school.

Henrietta had a vague understanding of him, nevertheless, as she sat thoughtfully by the window of this room. William could not endure to be outdone by anyone, but at school no American could be as the English were and there William felt himself unjustly surpassed. Moreover she herself surpassed him in their studies, and she had gone to some pains as she had grown older to hide from him the marks which made him hate her, too. And why should this only brother of hers suffer so much when, had he been content with himself, he might have been very happy? A handsome boy he had been, and his mind, developing more slowly than hers, was a good and even brilliant mind, likely now to have gone far ahead of hers. His intolerable, bitter, burning pride had poisoned him to the soul, a pride begun by their foolish old Chinese amah, who because he was a boy among girls, had loved him best and praised him most and made them all worship him as the young prince of the family — a pride fostered, certainly, by being an American among Chinese. But here in America itself there were no princes.

The door opened and Candace came in, trailing the lace ruffles of her negligee. It was almost noon and she had not yet dressed herself for the day. But so immaculate, so exquisite was she in her rose and lace, her fair hair so curled and smoothed and waved, that Henrietta felt dingy after her night on the train.

Candace held out her hands and her rings glittered. “Not to tell us that you were coming, you naughty thing!”

She had grown soft and was prettier than ever, slender but rounded and feminine and too tender in voice and eyes.

“I thought you would expect me to come at once,” Henrietta said. She submitted to a scented embrace and sat down again.

Candace sighed. The tears came to her violet eyes. “William is not to be consoled. He sits there beside his father day and night. He will neither eat nor rest. Your mother is sleeping. She is very tired. Ruth has gone home for a bit to be with her children. There is nothing to do here but wait.”

“Clem will be here tomorrow,” Henrietta said.

“How good of him to get away,” Candace said.

“It is not good of him,” Henrietta replied. “He does it for me.”

She found herself with nothing to say and so she sat for a moment in silence while Candace twisted the rings on her fingers. Then Henrietta made up her mind. She did not intend to be cowed by this house or by any of William’s belongings or indeed by William himself.

“I would like to go to my father, please, Candace. I have not seen him at all, you know.”

Candace looked distressed. Her mouth, soft and full and red, looked suddenly childish and she bit her lower lip. “I don’t know if William will—”

“William knows me,” Henrietta said. “He will not blame you.”

She rose and Candace, as though she submitted by habit, rose too, and in silent doubtfulness she led Henrietta across the hall through another large room — a music room, Henrietta saw, since it contained a grand piano and a gramophone set into a carved cabinet, and then across a hall which ended in a conservatory, and at last to heavy closed doors of polished oak. Here Candace paused and then she slid the doors a small distance apart. Over her shoulder Henrietta looked into an immense library, in the center of which stood a bier. There William sat. He had drawn a leather armchair close enough to see his father’s face. A tall pot of lilies stood at the foot of the bier. Upon this scene the sunshine of the morning streamed through high southern windows.

Henrietta gently put Candace aside and entered the room. “William, I have come.”

William looked at her startled. Then he rose. “You came early, Henrietta.” His voice, deep and always harsh, was composed.

“I came as soon as I had Mother’s telegram.”

Candace had closed the doors and gone away and they were alone. She went to the bier and looked down upon her father’s face. It was as white as an image of snow. The long thin hands folded upon the breast were of the same deadly whiteness.

“I am glad you have not sent him away,” Henrietta said.

“Whatever had to be done was done here.”

“He is desperately thin.”

“He was ill for two years,” William said. “Of course Mother did not realize it, nor did he complain. His intestines were eaten away by the wretched disease. There was no hope.”

Neither of them wept, and neither expected weeping of the other.

“I am glad he did not die over there,” William said.

“Perhaps he would rather have died there. He loved the Chinese so much,” Henrietta said.

“He wasted his life upon them,” said William.

He spoke without emotion, yet she felt his absolute grief. He revealed himself in this grief as she had never seen him, a gaunt lonely man, still young, and his pride was bitter in his face, in his haughty bearing, in the abrupt movements of his hands.

“It is a comfort to you that he came here to die.” This she added in sudden pity for him.

“It is more than a comfort,” he replied. “It was his last mission.”

She turned her gaze then from the calm dead face to look at William and perceived in his stone-gray eyes a look so profoundly strange, for that was the word which came to her mind, that she was for the first time in her life half frightened of him.

William had no impulse to tell her of those last words which his father had spoken. For him they had indeed taken on the importance of prophecy. His father, he had learned from his mother, had a premonition of approaching death during the last year in Peking. He had long refused to come back to America because, he said simply, he wanted to die in China and be buried there. Yet when he felt death imminent he changed his mind. “I must see William,” he had told her one night when he woke as he often did long before dawn. “I must see my son. I want to talk with him. I have things to tell him.”

Here his mother had paused to wipe her eyes and also to ask him in curiosity, “What things did he tell you, William?”

He could not share even with her the solemnity of those last words his father had been able to speak. They were few, far fewer than he had meant to speak, William felt sure, had he not been so ill in the last weeks before the end. And yet in few words all was said. He understood that his father had come thousands of miles by land and sea to speak them to his dear and only son, and so he forgave his father everything, all the shame of being his son, the disgrace of the lowliness of being the son of a poor man and a missionary. By his love for his son and by his death his father had lifted himself up into sainthood. There was symbolism here which in its way was as great as that of the Cross. He was his father’s only begotten son, whom his father so loved. …

“William, are you sure you feel well?”

Henrietta’s anxious voice flung ice upon his burning heart.

His old irritation flared at her. “Of course I am well! Naturally I am tired. I don’t expect to rest until after the funeral tomorrow. I think you ought to go and see Mother.”

“Candace said she was sleeping.”

“Then it is time she woke.”

He took her elbow and led her out of the room. In the hall he pressed a button and the man appeared again. “Take my sister upstairs to my mother’s room,” William ordered.

“Yes, sir. This way if you please, Madame.”

The sliding doors closed behind Henrietta and she was compelled to follow the man, her footsteps sinking again into heavy carpets across the hall and up the stairs and down another hall to one of a half dozen closed doors. Here the man knocked. She heard her mother’s voice. “Who is it?”

“Thank you,” Henrietta said, dismissing the man with a nod. She opened the door. There her mother sat at a small desk, fully dressed, her steel-gray hair swept up into a thick knot on top of her head. She was writing and she lifted her pen and turned her head.

“Henrietta, my dear!” She rose, majestic, and held out her arms. “My dear daughter!”

Henrietta allowed herself to be enveloped and she kissed her mother’s dry cheek. She saw in the first glance that although her mother had aged or weathered into a dry ruddiness in the years since they had last met, she was not changed. Neither life nor death could change her. There was nothing new here. Her mother planned what to do, how to behave, what to say. Henrietta withdrew herself and sat down and took off her hat and coat.

“Mother, it was so strange to find you and Father gone away when we got to Peking.”

“You should have told us you were coming,” Mrs. Lane said, “then you needn’t have come all that way.”

Henrietta refrained from mentioning Clem, his reasons for wanting to go to China, the suddenness of their departure.

“Please, Mother, tell me everything.”

Her mother could tell only so much as she could comprehend of what had gone on.

“Everything got harder in Peking,” her mother began. “It wasn’t in the least as it had been in the dear old days. You remember, Henrietta, how easy everything used to be? When you were a child, I was received most courteously wherever I went, merely because I was a foreigner. That was after the Boxer Rebellion, of course. Peking was heavenly then. I got to be fond of the Old Empress, really fond! I went with Mrs. Conger sometimes to call and Her Majesty used to have one of her ladies explain to me, so that I could tell Mrs. Conger who spoke no Chinese at all, how sorry she was for all that had happened, and how she understood that we were all there for the good of China. Then she would reach out her hand and stroke mine. She had the most beautiful old hand — so delicate, covered with rings, and then the long enameled nail protectors. It was really wonderful to see her. I don’t think most people understood her. I used to tell your father so, but he would never trust her, no matter what I said.”

“When did Father fall ill?” Henrietta asked.

“It began soon after that upstart Sun Yatsen stirred up the people. Your father was so worried. I told him that nothing would be made better by his worrying, but you know he never listened to me. In his way he was frightfully stubborn. And things began to get so hard. After the Empress died the wonderful courtesy just ended — like that! Even the people on the streets began to be rough to us. They didn’t seem to want us in Peking. Your father was stoned one Sunday night on his way to chapel.”

“Stoned — for what?” Henrietta asked.

“For nothing — just because he was a foreigner. Then it got better again. Oh dear, you’ve been away so long! It’s difficult to explain. But it has been one thing after another, a revolution about something all the time, and when I told your father he was looking thin he always said he couldn’t leave.”

“And when he did leave he wanted to go to William.”

“He got the idea suddenly that William needed him. I remember he said a queer thing when we were standing on the deck as the steamer pulled away from Shanghai. He was staring at the shore and then he said, ‘But what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own son?’ ”

Henrietta did not answer. She did not listen any more to her mother’s prattling voice. A strange thing for her father to say, and what did it mean?

Henrietta went herself to the station to meet Clem. With his usual skill, perfected by constant travel, he managed to catch a train at the last moment possible in time to get to the funeral. Had there been half an hour’s delay it would have been too late. But Henrietta had now come to believe that there would never be such delay upon any train which Clem chose to take. Luck was the aura in which he lived.

Thus she stood waiting on the platform while the train drew in, accurate to the second. Clem was always the first passenger to get out. She saw him swing himself down, shake his head at a porter and come hurrying toward her, carrying his small bag. William’s chauffeur stepped forward to take it but Clem resisted.

“I’m used to carrying my own suitcase, thanks.”

He threw the man a brief bright abstract smile, then forgot him. “Henrietta, gosh — it’s good to see you! How are you, hon?”

“Come on, Clem. We haven’t a moment.”

“Funeral isn’t till four, is it? Lots of time.”

This Henrietta would not allow. “Come on, do. Everybody’s waiting.”

“Everybody’s early then.” But he humored her, seeing that her eyes were washed with weeping.

They got into the big heavy car which William had imported from England. Clem lifted his sandy eyebrows and said nothing, but Henrietta understood his reproach.

“Never mind, he always hates England and yet he worships everything English.”

“I don’t mind. Anything to tell me, hon?”

“Not now, Clem. Afterward.”

They drove in silence through the bright New York streets. He saw her dressed for the first time in black. She looked handsome but he had better sense than to tell her so now. He wanted to share her sorrow but he could not. When he thought of Dr. Lane’s death he saw with dreadful renewal the sight of his own father lying with his head half severed from his neck, in the midst of the other dead. He wanted to talk quickly about something else, tell her how triumphant the market opening in Dayton had really been, and yet he knew that he should not speak of that, either, here or now. To escape the inescapable memory he stared out into the streets, trying to catch from the passing windows ideas for advertising, for displays, for announcements, and while he did so he felt guilty because he dared not think of Henrietta’s grief. She could not comprehend, perhaps, though he had told her everything, how memory could pervade his whole life if he gave it the least chance at him. He crowded it out by his constant activity, by his incessant planning and incredible accomplishment.

“You are never still,” she said with sudden and extraordinary impatience.

He looked at her, astonished.

“Oh, Clem!” She seized his hand in both of hers.

He saw tears brimming again into her eyes. “I know, Henrietta. I don’t know why I can’t sit still.”

She was broken by his humility. “Don’t mind me. I can’t tell you why I feel so mixed up.”

“That’s all right.”

He made a superhuman effort then and did sit still, forcing his hand that held hers to be still, keeping his feet from twitching or shuffling, refusing to recognize the itch of his nose, his cheek, the nervous ache of arm or leg, the innumerable minute demands of his tense frame.

She was grateful and in silence they sat while the car swept them up to the huge church on Fifth Avenue where William had commanded that his father’s body be laid. Here she and Clem got out and mounted the marble steps. In the lobby they were met by an attendant of some sort, who guided them in silence to an area of pews tied in with black ribbon, where the family was assembled. To her surprise she saw even Roger Cameron and his wife, Roger lean and aged and looking as permanent as a mummy. Her seat and Clem’s had been kept beside William. She sat down.

Clem looked across Henrietta into William’s eyes, gray under the heavy brows. He felt a shock in his breast. The tall grim boy he had seen on the Peking street had grown into a tall grim man. In the one glance and the brief nod Clem saw the long square face, the pallid skin, the deep-set eyes and black brows, and the strained handsome mouth. Then he sat down, forgetting the dead. William was unhappy! The sorrow of the last few weeks could not have worked quickly enough to carve his face into such lines. But why should William be unhappy as well as sorrowful? Unhappiness was something deep, permeating to the very sinews of a man’s soul.

“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” The rich and polished voice of the robed minister rolled from the chancel. Clem breathed hard and tried not to shift his feet. The flowers were too fragrant, the church too warm. Upon the bier he saw a white-faced statue, handsomely clothed and surrounded with flowers so skillfully that they made a background for him. This statue did not look in the least like Dr. Lane, whom he remembered as a quiet melancholy saint, always withdrawn though kind. This dead man looked proud and even haughty. His features were too clear, the eyebrows touched with black, the lips with a pale red, the nose perfected, the sleeping eyelids outlined. The head had immense and marble dignity. As he remembered, Dr. Lane had walked with a slight stoop, a humble pose of the head, and his features though good were blurred with the thoughtful doubt of a man who always saw the other side of everything.

William, he supposed, had ordered all to be of the best, and so they had made the best of Dr. Lane. Clem disliked what he saw and feeling the impulse to move now become uncontrollable he stealthily shifted his feet, scratched his wrists and palms, and even rubbed his nose with his forefinger while a woman with a loud clear soprano sang a hymn, “For All the Saints Who from Their Labors Rest.” Henrietta pressed his arm with her shoulder and he became quiet again.

The minister got up and began a eulogy of Dr. Lane, whom he had never known, and Clem listened. All the facts were right, he supposed — Dr. Lane, the father of William Lane, one of America’s great figures, was born of a distinguished and scholarly family. Although his family had not entirely approved his becoming a missionary he had persisted in his noble determination, in which he was joined by a fine young woman of equally good family. It was not usual that two young people of such position gave up all to follow after Christ in a heathen country. There Dr. Lane’s efforts had been singularly blessed. He had become important not only in the mission field but in his interpretation of the Chinese mind during the political crises of recent years.

“The fellow isn’t saying the really important things,” Clem told himself. It was strange that William had not pointed out to the minister that his father understood the Chinese and appreciated them and that he had not always wanted to convert them. That was why they had liked him. William should have told the small good things his father did, how he always put his hand into his pocket when he saw a beggar. …

Dr. Lane, now, would have understood how he himself felt about getting food to people, quick and cheap. He would have enjoyed telling him about his markets and how he planned to find something that could be done anywhere in the world. He could have told all that to Dr. Lane, things he had not even told Henrietta, though she always stood by him whether she believed he could do it or not. But Dr. Lane would have believed it, maybe.

Clem stole a glance at William’s profile. They were standing up. The funeral was almost over. Maybe he would be able to talk with William tomorrow when this was past. There was the grave yet.

Around the open grave he stood among this family he did not know, yet to which he belonged because he and Henrietta belonged together. He saw them all, Jeremy and Ruth and the girls — cute little things, dressed in white instead of black, little white fur hats and coats. He had never seen Jeremy or Ruth or Mrs. Lane. They were the sort of people he did not know.

While the minister spoke his solemn rich words and crumbled earth upon the coffin, Clem stood looking brightly abstracted, entirely unconscious, while his mind glanced at the various miracles of his life, first of which was that Henrietta had wanted to marry him. Seeing this family, he could not understand it, though he was not humble, either. The miracle was that, having been born among these people, she should have had the wit to see what he was and what he could do before he had done it.

He looked at her as she stood, her black-gloved hands clasped, her strong profile bent, her eyes upon the ground. He loved her mightily, he loved her the way he loved his work, the way he loved his dream. It was one of the big things. But she was whole and entire without him. He did not think of her as a part of himself because he thought nothing of himself. He did not know how he looked or what sort of a man he was. He was as fleshless as a grasshopper.

He was glad that Henrietta had never spoken to him of having children. He had seen too many children starving to death. The villages on that long and lonely march from Peking to the sea had been busy with children, dirty, laughing, hungry — so many children in the world, anyway. When he thought of children he always thought of his sisters as he had last seen them and his mind swerved away from that again. He had to be free to accomplish the thing for which he was born and children ought to be kept at home, treasures in a box. If his sisters had been kept at home they would have been alive today. He did not ever want children.

Tim and Jen and Mamie! When he had hurried back to the farm after reading the ghastly story that held the headlines for a day, Tim was dead and buried. Pop Berger was in bed sick and he cried whenever anyone spoke to him. A police guard sat by the bed and there were reporters everywhere. Mom Berger kept the girls in the kitchen with her and the doors shut. There had been a square-set newspaper fellow there whose name was Seth James. He had gone away after he heard Clem was going to take the two girls to Ohio.

“You’re the only decent person I’ve seen,” the fellow had said and had shaken Clem’s hand up and down hard half a dozen times.

Clem had not known what to do with Mamie and Jen. They had cried when he took them away. But Henrietta had been nice to them and after a while they learned to wait on people in the store. Then, after they had fattened up a bit and got better looking, they had both married farm boys. Mamie had died when her baby was born but Jen, who he had always supposed could not live long, was growing stout and talkative. Food had done it, of course — plenty of good food.

He came to himself suddenly when Henrietta put her hand on his arm. The funeral was over and he was ashamed that he had not kept his mind on it. He turned, obedient to her touch, and joined the solemn family procession back to the funeral cars.

The procession stopped at William’s house and the family descended and entered the huge front door, held open by the footman, who wore a proper look of gloom. Roger Cameron and his wife had gone home, their car swerving past the ones that stopped. When Candace had begged her father to come in and stay the evening with her he had refused. “I swore ten years ago I would never go to another funeral before my own, and it was only because your mother forced me that I have come today. You’ll have to get through the rest of the day the best you can, daughter.”

Candace went upstairs and changed her black garments for a soft white gown whose collar she tied with a black ribbon. Then she hurried downstairs to see if the tea which William had ordered to be ready was set upon the table. It was more than a usual tea. Henrietta and Clem were taking an early train and Jeremy and Ruth must go home with their children. There were ham and sliced cold chicken upon the buffet and she knew that the cook had beaten up a custard dessert. By her command there were no flowers on the table. She had seen so many flowers this day that she did not want any more. Red roses perhaps next week! The dreadful thing was that she had felt no sorrow; a mild sadness, of course, such as death always persuades, but not sorrow. It was impossible to grieve for an old man to whom she had scarcely spoken, a sweet old man, she saw, even through his illness. But what troubled her was that she had not been able to share William’s sorrow. He treasured it, he kept it to himself, he endured with such nobleness that she felt repelled and then was angry with herself. She dreaded tomorrow when nobody would be here — except, of course, his mother. For the first time she felt glad that his mother was going to spend the winter with them. Perhaps together they could understand William better and make him happy.

At this moment while she moved about the dining room, Henrietta’s husband came to the door and looked in. He made her think of a bird, slender, bright-faced, boyish, making so many little quick unconscious movements. He was completely different from Henrietta and yet there was something between them. She did not see why William had been angry when Henrietta married Clem.

“Come in, Clem,” she said sweetly.

He came in, his hands in his pockets jingling something, keys, coins — no, a small bottle of pills which he now brought out. “Can I find some water somewhere? All this has brought on my nervous indigestion.”

She lifted a cut-glass carafe from the sideboard and he whistled softly when he took it. “Solid, isn’t it?”

“A wedding present. If you saw the amount of cut glass I have packed away, besides all this!”

“Swell wedding, must have been. But then, William would have that. Did he ever tell you we met once?”

“No, did you?”

He rolled pills into the palm of his hand, threw them in his mouth, gulped them and washed them down with water he poured into a goblet on the table. “Maybe he has forgotten but I never have. A Chinese boy and I were kind of dancing around each other ready to let out our fists when William came by and stopped us.”

“Did he know you?”

Clem grinned mischievously and she saw freckles under his pale skin. “No — but he knew who I was.”

“What do you mean?”

“I came from the wrong side of the tracks, see?”

“There were no tracks in Peking, were there?”

“Oh yes, there were. The Lanes were aristocrats compared to us. Dr. Lane got a salary every month. They lived in a compound. My father hadn’t any salary. He was low enough to live on faith alone.”

They spoke in half whispers, almost guiltily, enjoying the respite from gloom. He had a sense of humor, Candace saw. And Clem saw a pleasant pretty woman, an honest woman at that, not too smart maybe, certainly not grand like his Henrietta, but nice to talk to, especially after a funeral.

“Christians are like other people. What’ll I call you — Mrs. William?”

“Oh, call me Candy.”

“Candy, eh? Nice name for you. My father was ignorant, Candy, just plain uneducated like I am. There’s a difference, though. I wanted an education and he didn’t believe it was right. He thought God would provide everything — even food, you know. Dr. Lane knew better. He was real well educated. Of course my father was only a farm boy.”

Candace stared at him, not comprehending in spite of what she heard. He tried further.

“All the well-heeled missionaries who didn’t have to trust God looked down on us, naturally. I guess my poor old dad was a sort of beggar sometimes. When he saw us hungry and no food in sight he used to push God a little.”

“How?”

Clem’s face turned red and the freckles disappeared. “He went to the other missionaries — or even sometimes to the Chinese — and told them we had nothing to eat.” He tried to laugh. “Kind of tattletale on God, I guess! Anyway, I don’t like to think of it.”

“I’m sure William has forgotten all of that,” Candace said, on a rush of pity and vague affection for this too honest man.

“Maybe,” Clem said. He looked sober and began jingling his pockets again.

Something haunted his restless blue eyes and Candace went on pitying him. “You’re very happy with Henrietta, aren’t you? She adores you, I think. When she talks about you she looks as though she were thinking of her child as well as her husband.”

“There is nobody in the whole world like Henrietta,” Clem said. The red had left his face as quickly as it had come and the freckles were back. “I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have her. She’s my life’s foundation. I’ll build all sorts of superstructures, maybe, in what I’m trying to do about food, but she keeps me steady. And here’s the thing — she never discourages me.”

“Wonderful! And what are you trying to do about food, Clem?”

“Oh — just feed the world.”

“Hush!”

She put a hand, pretty and ringed, upon Clem’s arm. They listened and she took it away again. William entered the room and she turned to him

“Clem and I are here waiting, William. Everything is ready.”

“I don’t know where everyone is,” William said.

He sat down in a great Jacobean chair that stood beside the long windows opening to a wide terrace. He still wore his black suit and above the dead hue of the broadcloth his face was whiter than ever, his brows more intense.

“Clem was talking about feeding the world.”

William glanced from under his eyebrows and Clem suddenly heard the jingling in his own pockets and took his hands out of them.

“You are in the food business, aren’t you?” William asked without interest.

“Yes,” Clem replied. “I’ve just opened a big new market at Dayton, Ohio.”

“What has that to do with the world?”

“Just a beginning,” Clem said without humility. He was surprised to find that he rather enjoyed talking with William. There was an edge to it. Walking briskly across the floor he took the other Jacobean chair on the opposite side of the window and turning sidewise began to talk with sudden fluency.

“I began in the simplest sort of way — with a grocery store, in fact, in a small town, New Point, Ohio. It’s still the home base. I have no family, you know — Boxer Rebellion put an end to that.”

“My father told me,” William said.

“Yes, well, we don’t have to remember the past. But the way we had to live when I was a kid I suppose made me awful interested in food. Can’t eat much myself — I have nervous indigestion. All that wonderful stuff on the table there — I won’t hardly touch it. A cup of tea maybe and a little chicken. Bread poisons me, though I make the finest bread. Say, William, do you remember Chinese bread?”

“My mother never let us eat Chinese things.”

“Well, we were thankful for that bread at our house. It was a lot easier to take than starvation. I learned what good bread was. I might send you a few loaves of my product.”

William was too shocked to thank him. “Is your business successful?” he asked coldly. The fellow looked like a country storekeeper.

“I undersell every staple,” Clem said with pride. “I watch the surplus everywhere in the country. Got twenty men doing just that. Some day I’ll be watching world surpluses. Then I’ll be doing what I mean to do.”

“You actually plan to establish a world food monopoly?” William for the first time in days looked interested.

“Hell no!” Clem said cheerfully. “I’m not interested in monopolies. I’m interested in getting people fed. If they can’t pay for it I give it to them.”

“You mean you give food to people?” William’s voice was unbelieving.

“Why not, if they’re hungry?”

“But you can’t stay in business that way.”

Clem wriggled in the huge chair, scratched one cheek and then the other with one hand, and then pulled the short hair over his right ear and rubbed both knees. “I don’t know why,” he said humbly “but I’m a millionaire already — or almost.”

Candace, seated upon one of the gilt dining chairs, suddenly began to laugh and William turned upon her.

“Why do you laugh, Candace?”

She buried her face in her hands and shook her head, still laughing. What had made her laugh was the look on William’s face but she could not tell him. “It’s so funny,” she gasped, her face still in her hands. “It’s so funny to get rich giving food away.”

“Nonsense,” William said. “Of course he doesn’t give it all away.”

“But to give any of it away,” she murmured. She found her handkerchief and wiped her eyes. Then she caught Clem grinning at her wryly.

“It is funny,” he agreed. “It’s darned funny. I can’t explain it. There’s some sort of magic hidden in the golden rule — I can’t explain it any other way.”

Upon this conversation, which had become entirely repulsive to William, Mrs. Lane now entered, followed by Jeremy and Ruth. Behind them came Henrietta with her hat on, ready for the train. William rose. “Let us take our places,” he said quietly. “Mother, please sit at my right. Ruth at my left, Jeremy at Candace’s right and Henrietta next. Your place, Clem.”

When they were all seated William lifted his head and fixed his eyes on a point above Candace’s head at the end of the long lace-spread table. She saw that there was something he wanted to say to them.

“It has not been our habit in this house to have grace before meals. Perhaps we have grown careless. But from this day on, in memory of my father. “I will say grace at meals in my house.”

His eyes fell and for an instant Candace’s caught them. He saw love and pity rush into tears and he bent his head to avoid the sight.

“Dear William,” his mother whispered, and put out her hand to him. But he did not pause to look at Candace or touch his mother’s hand. He bent his head and began to pray in a tense low voice:

“Our Father, for the food that Thou hast given us, receive our thanks. Bless this food to our use and us to Thy Kingdom, Amen.”

It was the grace that his father had used throughout the years of his missionary life.