son has to live like a gentleman,--that's what I
educated him for. Now help me off with my coat, and tell me all the damn
fool things you've been doing."

Their conference lasted well into the afternoon,--an afternoon filled
with surprises for them both. For the first time Allen found his father
an interested, sympathetic listener; for the first time Stephen Sanford
came to know his son. The boy made no effort to spare himself, though
eager for his father to realize that he had been earnest and
industrious, albeit the net results of this had been but failure. Mr.
Gorham had done so much for him, and he had tried to assimilate the
lessons both from his deeds and from his words; but instead he had seen
chimeras breathing fire at every turn, and had charged them quixote-like
to find them but windmills, harmful only to himself. He enlarged upon
the personal characteristics of the directors and the other business men
with whom he came in contact,--many of them well known to his
listener,--and Sanford marvelled at the accuracy of the boy's insight,
and the integrity of the portraits. Gorham was right,--Allen had
developed, and far beyond what he himself realized. He was now a man to
be reckoned with rather than a boy to be disciplined.

The old man's keen business sense also for the first time grasped the
tremendous scope of Gorham's gigantic project. There was no room left to
doubt the strength of the appeal of the absolute honesty of purpose
after listening to Allen's unconsciously irresistible testimony. In
words made pregnant by the simplicity of their utterance, he described
Gorham the man and Gorham the Colossus of the business world; he
pictured the waves of avarice and intrigue and discontent which he
thought he saw beating against the feet of this towering figure,
unheeded and unrecognized because so far beneath it; he told of his own
puny efforts to warn this giant of the storm which he thought he saw
approaching, but in doing this he had betrayed his own ignorance, and
had prepared the pit into which he himself had fallen.

"And the worst of it all is," Allen concluded, "that I can't see even
now where I was wrong; but if Mr. Gorham told me that Napoleon Bonaparte
discovered America I would know that, all previous statements to the
contrary, he was right."

"H'm!" ejaculated Sanford, eager to break over the injunction Gorham had
placed upon him. "I don't believe there's anything in what you've said
yet that yo