d rather feel the leading. To-morrow
always makes a turn. It's beautiful! People don't know, who _never_
shut their eyes!"

Kenneth had taken up a newspaper.

"The pretenses at doing! The dodges and go-betweens that make a sham
work between every two real ones! There's hardly a true business
carried on, and if there is, you don't know where or which. Look at
the advertisements. Why, they cheat with their very tops and faces!
See this man who puts in big capitals: 'Lost! $5,000! $1,000
reward!' and then tells you, in small type, that five thousand
dollars are lost every year by breaking glass and china, that his
cement will mend! What business has he to cry 'Wolf!' to the
hindrance of the next man who may have a real wolf to catch? And
what business has the printer, whom the next man will pay to
advertise his loss, to help on a lie like this beforehand? I'm only
twenty-six years old, Dorris, and I'm getting ashamed of the world!"

"Don't grow hard, Kenneth. 'The Son of Man came not to condemn the
world, but to save it.' Let's each try to save our little piece!"

We are listening across the street, you see; between the windows in
the rain; it is strange what chords one catches that do not catch
each other, and were never planned to be played together,--by the
_players_.

Kenneth Kincaid's father Robert had been a ship-builder. When
shipping went down in the whirlpool of 1857, Robert Kincaid's
building had gone; and afterward he had died leaving his children
little beside their education, which he thanked God was secured, and
a good repute that belonged to their name, but was easily forgotten
in the crowd of young and forward ones, and in the strife and
scramble of a new business growth.

Between college and technical studies Kenneth had been to the war.
After that he had a chance to make a fortune in Wall Street. His
father's brother, James, offered to take him in with him to buy and
sell stocks and gold, to watch the market, to touch little unseen
springs, to put the difference into his own pocket every time the
tide of value shifted, or could be made to seem to shift. He might
have been one of James R. Kincaid and Company. He would have none of
it. He told his uncle plainly that he wanted real work; that he had
not come back from fighting to--well, there he stopped, for he could
not fling the truth in his uncle's face; he said there were things
he meant to finish learning, and would try to do; and if nobody
wan