that a man shall get only what he works for. Can you
imagine him, the little ugly man, sitting at his table and thinking all
this? And suddenly he got to his feet. 'Yes,' he said, 'I'll make you a
rich man.' But he didn't say he would keep him one. That was the third
high light--the little man standing where all through the ages had stood
men like him, the secret movers of the world, while before them,
supplicating, had passed the beauty and the pride of their times. In the
end they all beg at the feet of power--the kings and the fighting men.
And yet, although this was the great, hidden triumph of his life, and,
moreover, beyond his hopes a realization of the game he had been
playing--for it put Bewsher, you see, utterly in his power--Morton said
at the moment it made him a little sick. It was too crude; Bewsher's
request too unashamed; it made suddenly too cheap, since men could ask
for it so lightly, all the stakes for which he, Morton, had sacrificed
the slow minutes and hours of his life. And then, of course, there was
this as well: Bewsher had been to Morton an ideal, and ideals can't die,
even the memory of them, without some pain."

Mrs. Malcolm, watching with lips a little parted, said to herself: "He
has uncoiled too much."

"Yes"--Sir John reached out his hand and, picking up a long-stemmed rose
from the table, began idly to twist it in his fingers. "And that was the
end. From then on the matter was simple. It was like a duel between a
trained swordsman and a novice; only it wasn't really a duel at all, for
one of the antagonists was unaware that he was fighting. I suppose that
most people would call it unfair. I have wondered. And yet Bewsher, in a
polo game, or in the game of social life, would not have hesitated to
use all the skill and craft he knew. But, you say, he would not have
played against beginners. Well, he had asked himself into this game; he
had not been invited. And so, all through that spring and into the
summer and autumn the three-cornered contest went on, and into the
winter and on to the spring beyond. Unwittingly, the girl was playing
more surely than ever into Morton's hand. The increasing number of
Bewsher's platitudes about wealth, about keeping up tradition, about
religion, showed that. He even talked vaguely about giving up the army
and going into business. 'It must have its fascinations, you know,' he
remarked lightly. In the eyes of both of them Morton had become sort of
fairy go