ds sprinkled with the tender green of
young crops. Beside them trailed the ashen country roads over which
farmers were crawling with their covered wagons; but, while Cyrus
watched from his height, there was as little thought in his mind for the
men who drove those wagons through the parching dust as for the beasts
that drew them. It is possible even that he did not see them, for just
as Mrs. Pendleton's vision eliminated the sight of suffering because her
heart was too tender to bear it, so he overlooked all facts except those
which were a part of the dominant motive of his life. Nearer still,
within the narrow board fences which surrounded the backyards of negro
hovels, under the moving shadows of broad-leaved mulberry or sycamore
trees, he gazed down on the swarms of mulatto children; though to his
mind that problem, like the problem of labour, loomed vague, detached,
and unreal--a thing that existed merely in the air, not in the concrete
images that he could understand.

"Well, it's a pity Gabriel never made more of himself," he thought
kindly. "Yes, it's a pity. I'll see what I can do for him."

At six o'clock that evening, when the end of his business day had come,
he joined James at the door for his walk back to Bolingbroke Street.

"Have you done anything about Jones's place in the bank?" was the first
question he asked after his abrupt nod of greeting.

"No, sir. I thought you were waiting to find out about Oliver."

"Then you thought wrong. The fellow's a fool. Look up that nephew of
Gabriel Pendleton, and see if he is fit for the job. I am sorry Jones is
dead," he added with a touch of feeling. "I remember I got him that
place the year after the war, and I never knew him to be ten minutes
late during all the time that I worked with him."

"But what are we to do with Oliver?" inquired James after a pause. "Of
course he wouldn't be much good in the bank, but----"

And without finishing his sentence, he glanced up in a tentative,
non-committal manner into Cyrus's face. He was a smaller and somewhat
imperfect copy of his father, naturally timid, and possessed of a
superstitious feeling that he should die in an accident. His thin anaemic
features lacked the strength of the Treadwells, though in his cautious
and taciturn way he was very far indeed from being the fool people
generally thought him. Since he had never loved anything with passion
except money, he was regarded by his neighbours as a man of
unimpea