sixty-yard run down the gridiron. Yet it is well to remember that
the victory came at the end of ten years' training at school and
college, after many bruises, some dislocations, and not a few breaks.
With such discipline, there was after all no reason to wonder that he
donned overalls and went to a desolate settlement of brick chimneys,
smelters, and shack dwellings, set on the sides of hills, which, because
of sulphurous fumes, were bleak as sandhills in Sahara.

He had taken up his work at Copper Rock exactly as he had taken up his
practice under the athletic coaches. He gave all the best of him, from
the earliest to the latest possible hours; and night saw him stretched
on a bunk which would have made his mother wince, but upon which he
slept the sleep of healthy, tired youth.

Three years he had spent in this place. Twice in that time furnace
explosions had sent him home to be nursed. But he suppressed the horrors
and related only enthusiastic tales of metallurgical possibilities. In
the main, however, he was strong enough to stand it. It did him a vast
amount of good; and the end of three years saw him saying good-by with
something akin to regret to the bleak shacks on the bleaker hills, and
to the men he had grown to know and appreciate.

An improved form of blast furnace that he had patented, eased his first
strenuous need of money. And the present moment found him vice-president
of a mining and smelting company, temporarily back among his old
friends, and somewhat in his old life again. He was too busy and too
interested in his work to spend any effort outside of it; but there were
one or two houses where he went, and one of them was the Randolphs'. The
Randolph and Derby country places adjoined, and since early boyhood he
had been as much at home in one house as in the other.

Mrs. Randolph had taken his college achievements complacently as a
tribute to her discernments in having nurtured an eagle in her own
swan's nest. But his work at Copper Rock seemed to her a fanatical whim.
She no more appreciated the benefit of the experience than she
understood the persevering grit that was the real reason for her liking
him. Nina, having adored him as a Greek god, continued her allegiance to
the workman at Copper Rock. She had written him letters regularly; she
had even sent him provision baskets. To herself she questioned whether
the end he was striving for might not be reached by smoother roads; but
if any one e