l one or the other has been
annihilated.

Nothing else is possible. Therefore, one of these four
things is to be the outcome of the present war.

If you can be shown now that if one of the first three is
not settled upon before next Wednesday the fourth will be
impossible beyond that date, and that it is absolutely in
the power of one man, without consultation with any one, to
bring about the accomplishment of any one of the first
three, you will meet that man before next Wednesday and make
your selection.

I can absolutely prove to you that this war will not
continue after next Wednesday, and that it is absolutely in
my power, without consulting any one, to do any one of the
three things you signify you desire done.

Mr. Vinal reported that Mr. Rogers also read this letter a second time,
but slowly and carefully, as though he were weighing each word, and
then, sealing it in the envelope, passed it back to him with: "Say to
your employer I return to New York to-morrow, Sunday night, and shall be
at my office, 26 Broadway, from 9.30 on Monday morning till five in the
afternoon; that I shall dine at my house, 26 East 57th Street; that I
shall be through dinner at eight o'clock, and that I go to bed at 10.30.
Tell him that any man who has an important communication to make to me
affecting a matter in which I have large interests will be welcome to
call on me between the hours I have named, provided he notifies me a
little while in advance."

When my secretary, whose practice it was to give me the minutest
details of such affairs as this errand, had reported all that had
happened, I at once sent a message to 26 Broadway stating that I would
be at Rogers' house at eight o'clock on Monday night, and on the stroke
I pushed his electric latchstring. His man had hardly taken my hat when
Mr. Rogers himself came down the hall with outstretched hand.

CHAPTER XVII

A MEMORABLE CONFERENCE

If the years of my life are protracted beyond the Psalmist's threescore
and ten, even though the events that chance in the comparatively long
future seethe and struggle as strenuously as those that befell in the
eager, vivid procession of yesterdays which makes up my past, my
memory's picture of this meeting will always hang where the lights cast
their kindest reflections.

I had left Boston on the noon train, and got down to my hotel, the
Brunswick, on Fift