ly his hopes, but his capital on him. He
simply knew that "the guv'nor" was wrapt up in the horrid thing, that
he had spent enormous sums on it, and he wasn't going to throw him
over at the start.

But he had not the smallest intention of spending his whole life so.
As always, long ago, in the darkness of the City shop, he had seen a
brilliance of his own spreading around Rickman's and beyond it,
shining away into the distance, so he saw it now, flinging out a
broad, flaming, unmistakable path that could by no possibility lead
back there. He only suffered a certain limited and unimportant part of
him to be made into a machine.

Meanwhile it was perhaps in the divine mercy that the workings of
this machine were hidden from Isaac. He hadn't even found out that the
secret spring was not in the brain but the heart of it. He would look
up a little uneasily as Keith pushed through the big swinging doors
and took his seat at the table on the platform, and while he wondered
what Keith was thinking of him, ten to one Keith wasn't thinking of
him at all.

This morning, however, he _was_ thinking of him, as it happened. And
when the old man saw him up there, holding his poor bursting head in
his hands, and said: "'Ead achin' my boy, again? That comes of
studyin' too 'ard!" he thought with a touch of compunction, "What
would he say if he knew I'd gone drunk to bed last night? And if he
knew about Poppy?"

Isaac approached his son gingerly and with a certain fear. The only
thing he had discovered about this admirable machine of his was that
it went better when you left it alone. It had not been going quite so
well lately though, and this morning it seemed decidedly out of order.
He took a seat at the table and busied himself with a catalogue.
Presently he rose and touched the boy gently on the shoulder.

"Come into the office a minute, will you?" he said, with a glance at
the cashier. And Keith, wondering what on earth he wanted with him,
followed into a recess shut on from the shop by a plate-glass and
mahogany screen. Isaac hunted among the papers on his writing-table
for a letter he could not find.

"You remember your old friend, Sir Joseph Harden, don't you?"

"Yes." Keith was in fact devoted to Sir Joseph's memory. He had often
wondered what it was, that mysterious "something" which Sir Joseph
would have done for him, if he had lived, and whether, if he had done
it, it would have made a difference.

"Well, I got a le