nce should not be made forcibly to apply to the
policy of a corporation, in which many others were interested, and he
felt that he would prefer to shift the responsibility on this point to
the gentlemen who presumably were paid for deciding just such things.
And as he listened, he found growing upon him the hope that Charlie's
plan would be adopted. This hope, unexpressed, was so utterly out of
keeping with what he had supposed to be his convictions that he
strangled it without a qualm. It was, he supposed, dead, when he sat
up at the further request of Mr. Jonas Green to answer a few additional
queries.

"Tell me," said Mr. Green, "do you honestly believe there's a particle
of danger of a big fire in this city? Pooh!" He dismissed the subject
almost contemptuously.

Some odd chord of recollection stirred in Mr. Hurd. Almost
unconsciously he responded:--

"The best technical engineers--not alarmists, but men who are careful
students of such things--agree that the conflagration hazard in the
congested district of Boston is not a thing one can exactly calculate,
but it would be difficult to overestimate its gravity."

The sounding syllables passed from his lips with a faint, far echo
which he found vaguely but unidentifiably familiar. But into the group
around the long table the utterance fell with cryptic, crucial
solemnity. Only Mr. Green, stubbornly contentious to the last, and
thinking anxiously of both horns of the dilemma at once, found voice or
will to reply.

"You don't say so!" he said feebly.

"I do," Mr. Hurd coolly rejoined. "And now, gentlemen, the motion is
in order: Shall the Massachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company
insure its properties against loss by fire?"

And when the motion was put, there was no dissenting voice.

Of this somewhat unprecedented meeting the close at least was normal.
But Mr. Jonas Green grasped his ten dollar gold piece more firmly than
ever as he passed through the doorway.

CHAPTER VIII

One of the most inexplicable things in human nature is, commonly, the
stuff out of which other people carve their fetiches. A philosopher is a
man who can understand the incomprehensible selections by other men of
the objects of their adoration. But philosophers are uncommon.

To Helen Maitland, leaving Fifth Avenue at Fifty-ninth Street and
straying northwestward into the early autumn splendor of the Park, it
seemed as though for the first time she could underst