are paying you a very large salary, Mr. Kittrell, and your work, if
you will pardon me, has not been up to what we were led to expect."

"You are quite right, Mr. Benson, but I can't draw that cartoon."

"Well, great God!" yelled Burns, "what have we got here--a gold brick?"
He rose with a vivid sneer on his red face, plunged his hands in his
pockets, and took two or three nervous strides across the room. Kittrell
looked at him, and slowly his eyes blazed out of a face that had gone
white on the instant.

"What did you say, sir?" he demanded.

Burns thrust his red face, with its prognathic jaw, menacingly toward
Kittrell.

"I said that in you we'd got a gold brick."

"You?" said Kittrell. "What have you to do with it? I don't work for
you."

"You don't? Well, I guess it's us that puts up--"

"Gentlemen! Gentlemen!" said Glenn, waving a white, pacificatory hand.

"Yes, let me deal with this, if you please," said Benson, looking hard
at Burns. The street-car man sneered again, then, in ostentatious
contempt, looked out the window. And in the stillness Benson continued:

"Mr. Kittrell, think a minute. Is your decision final?"

"It is final, Mr. Benson," said Kittrell. "And as for you, Burns," he
glared angrily at the man, "I wouldn't draw that cartoon for all the
dirty money that all the bribing street-car companies in the world could
put into Mr. Glenn's bank here. Good evening, gentlemen."

It was not until he stood again in his own home that Kittrell felt the
physical effects which the spiritual squalor of such a scene was certain
to produce in a nature like his.

"Neil! What is the matter?" Edith fluttered toward him in alarm.

He sank into a chair, and for a moment he looked as if he would faint,
but he looked wanly up at her and said:

"Nothing; I'm all right; just a little weak. I've gone through a
sickening, horrible scene--"

"Dearest!"

"And I'm off the _Telegraph_--and a man once more!"

He bent over, with his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands, and
when Edith put her calm, caressing hand on his brow, she found that it
was moist from nervousness. Presently he was able to tell her the whole
story.

"It was, after all, Edith, a fitting conclusion to my experience on the
_Telegraph_. I suppose, though, that to people who are used to ten
thousand a year such scenes are nothing at all." She saw in this trace
of his old humor that he was himself again, and she hugged his head to
her bos