is still making money, and Johnson has stopped
leaks to the amount of at least twenty thousand dollars a year, which
will permit us to keep up the ten per cent. dividends, even with our
increased capitalization, and even without an increase of business."

"Glorious!" she said with sparkling eyes.

"Too good to be true," he assured her. "They'll take it away from me."

"How is it possible?" she asked.

"It isn't; but it will happen, nevertheless," he declared with
conviction.

He had already begun to spend his days and nights in apprehension of
this, and as the weeks went on and nothing happened his apprehension
grew rather than diminished.

In the meantime, the Consolidated Illuminating and Power Company went
pompously on. The great combine was formed, the fifty million dollars'
worth of stock was opened for subscription, and the company gave a
vastly expensive banquet in the convention hall of the Hotel Spender,
at which a thousand of the city's foremost men were entertained, and
where the cleverest after-dinner speakers to be obtained talked in
relays until long after midnight. Those who came to eat the rich food
and drink the rare wine and lend their countenances to the stupendous
local enterprise, being shrewd business graduates who had cut their
eye-teeth in their cradles, smiled and went home without any thought
of investing; but the hard-working, economical chaps of the offices
and shops, men who felt elated if, after five years of slavery, they
could show ten hundred dollars of savings, glanced in awe over this
magnificent list of names in the next day's papers. If the stock of
the Consolidated Illuminating and Power Company was considered a good
investment by these generals and captains and lieutenants of finance,
who, of course, attended this Arabian Nights banquet as investors, it
must certainly be a good investment for the corporals and privates.

Immediately vivid results were shown. Immense electric signs,
furnished at less than cost and some of them as big as the buildings
upon the roofs of which they were erected, began to make
constellations in the city sky; buildings in the principal down-town
squares were studded, for little or nothing, with outside incandescent
lights as thickly as wall space could be found for them, and the men
whose only automobiles are street-cars awoke to the fact that their
city was becoming intensely metropolitan; that it was blazing with the
blaze of Paris and London