eat Steel Axle Company, the richest
and most important of all, lodged royally. But on the very topmost
floor of all were the offices devoted to the personal affairs of Peter
Masters, and through them, shut in by a watchful guard of head clerks,
was the innermost sanctum, the nest of the great spider whose
intricate web stretched over so great a circumference, the central
point from which radiated the vast circle of concerns, and to which
they ultimately returned materialised into precious metal--the private
office, in short, of Peter Masters.

The heads of each separate floor were picked men--great men away from
the golden glamour of the master mind--each involved in the success or
failure of his own concern, all partners in their respective firms,
but partners who accepted the share allotted to them without question,
who served faithfully or disappeared from the ken of their
fellow-workers, who were nominally accountable to their respective
"company," but actually dependent on the word and will of the great
man up above them. None but these men and his own special clerks ever
approached him. Some junior clerk or obscure worker might pass him
occasionally in a passage, or await the service of the lift at his
pleasure; they might receive a sharp glance, a demand for name and
department, but they knew no more of this controller of their humble
destinies.

It was a marvellous organisation, a perfected system, a machine whose
parts were composed of living men.

The owner of the machine cared much for the whole and nothing for the
parts. When some screw or nut failed to answer its purpose, it was
cast aside and another substituted. There was no question, no appeal.
Nuts and screws are cheap. The various parts were well cared for, well
oiled, just so long as they fulfilled their purpose; if they failed in
that--well, the running of the machine was not endangered for
sentiment.

Apart from this business, however, Peter Masters was a man of
sentiment, though the workers in Masters's Building would have scorned
the idea. He had expended this sentiment on two people, one, his wife,
who had died in Whitmansworth Union, the other Aymer Aston, his
cousin, who on the moment of his declared union with Elizabeth
Hibbault, had fallen victim to so grim a tragedy. His "sentiment" had
never spread beyond these two people, certainly never to the person of
his unseen child, whom, however, he was prepared to "discover" in his
own good t