Louis when you took your ticket. And coming here, sooner or later you
would have found your way to this house--to a seat on these cushions. I
could tell you more, but my prophetic soul warns me that Agatha
Severance is protesting to Mr. Wamble that she can't _possibly_ play the
particular song he is asking for without the music. I'm going to
convince her that she can."

Some little time after this, Raymer, who had been one of the men
introduced by Jasper Grierson, turned up again in the invalid's corner.

"Sit down, won't you?" said Griswold, making a move to share the
cushions with the young ironmaster; and it was thus that the door to a
friendship was opened. Farther on, when they had gotten safely beyond
the commonplaces, Raymer suggested the smoking-room and a cigar, and
Griswold went willingly.

"I was wondering if you were like me in that, Mr. Raymer," he said. "I
never feel properly acquainted with a man until I have smoked with him."

"Or with a woman until she has made a cup of tea for you?" laughed the
native. "That is Miss Margery's try-out. She has taught us the
potentialities that lie in a cup of tea well brewed and skilfully
sweetened."

From that on, the path to better acquaintance was the easiest of
short-cuts, even as the mild cigar which Raymer found in his pocket-case
paved the way for a return of the smoker's zest in the convalescent.
Without calling himself a reformer, the young ironmaster proved to be a
practical sociologist. Wherefore, when Griswold presently mounted his
own sociological hobby, he was promptly invited to visit the Raymer
Foundry and Machine Works, to the end that he might have some of his
theories of the universal oppression of wage-earners charitably
modified.

"Of course, I don't deny that we're a long way from the Millennium,
yet," was Raymer's summing up of the conditions in his own plant. "But I
do claim that we are on a present-day, living footing. So far as the men
understand loyalty, they are loyal; partly to my father's memory;
partly, I hope, to me. We have never had a strike or an approach to one,
or a disagreement that could not be adjusted amicably. Whether these
conditions can be maintained after we double our capacity and get in a
lot of new blood, I can't say. But I hope they can."

"You are enlarging?" said Griswold.

Raymer waited until the only other man in the smoking-den had gone back
to the drawing-rooms before he said: "Yes; I caught the fever alo