siness that had devoured their best years, used to mutter darkly and
knowingly that this was a portentous sign; that the Holroyd connection
meant by-and-by to get hold of the whole Republic of Costaguana, lock,
stock, and barrel. But, in fact, the hobby theory was the right one. It
interested the great man to attend personally to the San Tome mine; it
interested him so much that he allowed this hobby to give a direction to
the first complete holiday he had taken for quite a startling number
of years. He was not running a great enterprise there; no mere railway
board or industrial corporation. He was running a man! A success would
have pleased him very much on refreshingly novel grounds; but, on the
other side of the same feeling, it was incumbent upon him to cast it
off utterly at the first sign of failure. A man may be thrown off. The
papers had unfortunately trumpeted all over the land his journey to
Costaguana. If he was pleased at the way Charles Gould was going on, he
infused an added grimness into his assurances of support. Even at the
very last interview, half an hour or so before he rolled out of the
patio, hat in hand, behind Mrs. Gould's white mules, he had said in
Charles's room--

"You go ahead in your own way, and I shall know how to help you as long
as you hold your own. But you may rest assured that in a given case we
shall know how to drop you in time."

To this Charles Gould's only answer had been: "You may begin sending out
the machinery as soon as you like."

And the great man had liked this imperturbable assurance. The secret
of it was that to Charles Gould's mind these uncompromising terms were
agreeable. Like this the mine preserved its identity, with which he had
endowed it as a boy; and it remained dependent on himself alone. It was
a serious affair, and he, too, took it grimly.

"Of course," he said to his wife, alluding to this last conversation
with the departed guest, while they walked slowly up and down the
corredor, followed by the irritated eye of the parrot--"of course, a
man of that sort can take up a thing or drop it when he likes. He will
suffer from no sense of defeat. He may have to give in, or he may have
to die to-morrow, but the great silver and iron interests will survive,
and some day will get hold of Costaguana along with the rest of the
world."

They had stopped near the cage. The parrot, catching the sound of a word
belonging to his vocabulary, was moved to interfere. Pa