ade a
mistake about me."

"A mistake?" said the other man.

"A colossal mistake. Your only objection to me as a son-in-law was on
financial grounds. Show me, if you can, any young man you could have
picked out as a husband for your daughter, who within a few months
could have saved your company three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
No, Mr. Hurd, you've done me a very great injustice. And now, I'm
going to ask two things of you."

"And what are they?" inquired Mr. Hurd.

"The first is your order for rewriting the schedule on the traction
properties. We'll take up the second when we've finished that."

John M. Hurd gave a half hitch in his chair, and turned his face toward
the window, the very casement out of which he had gazed on the day when
the fate of Mr. Wilkinson's scheme was first decided. Thoughtfully he
looked out and down the busy street. His visitor, by way of gently
stimulating his reverie, laid the companies' loss drafts within an inch
of his unmoving fingers. Unconsciously those fingers, which had
through the long years acquired an inalienable tendency toward the
acquisition of legal tender in whatever form proffered--those fingers
slowly, almost automatically, but irrevocably, closed upon the little
packet.

It seemed as though, from the contact, a soothing hint of balsam-laden
pines, of comfort and satisfaction for the soul, must have proceeded
from those oblong papers. Charlie, keenly watching, beheld the stony
countenance in front of him, as if permeated by some ineffable warmth,
stir and become human. The miracle of Galatea was worked in this face
before the very gaze of him who had dispensed the beneficent influence.
The grim lines around the mouth lost their inflexible rigor; and
slowly, unwillingly, almost shamefacedly there stole into the hard old
visage the hint, the wraith, the shadow of a smile.

Wise in his generation, Wilkinson left the work to the magic and
sovereign forces now at play; he did not risk marring the alchemy by a
single word. After a moment which seemed an hour he found himself once
more confronted by the direct observation of his step-uncle.

"You can have your trolley schedule," said John M. Hurd. "You are
certainly entitled to it. What else you want I dare say I can
guess. . . . Suppose you bring Isabel up to Beacon Street this
afternoon to take tea with her mother--and me."

If Mr. Wilkinson cut a pigeon wing in the outer office, it was only the
s