ose so," said the other grudgingly. "I'll look at the
boy in the morning. But he'll be all right. Only, don't take up your
itinerating again for a few days."

"I'm through, I tell you. Give me a growing city to settle in and I'll
go in for the regular proprietary manufacturing game. Know anything
about Worthington?"

"Yes."

"Pretty good, live town?"

"First-class, and not too critical, I suppose, to accept your business,"
said Dr. Elliot dryly. "I'm on my way there now for a visit. Well, I
must get my little girl."

The itinerant opened the door, looked, and beckoned. The boy lay on his
pillow, the girl was curled in her chair, both fast asleep. Their hands
were lightly clasped.

Dr. Elliot lifted his ward and carried her away. The itinerant,
returning to the Hardscrabbler girl, took her out to arrange the night's
accommodation for her. So, there slept that night under one roof and at
the charge of Professor Andrew L. Certain, five human beings who, long
years after, were destined to meet and mingle their fates, intricate,
intimate strands in the pattern of human weal and woe.

CHAPTER II

OUR LEADING CITIZEN

The year of grace, 1913, commended itself to Dr. L. Andre Surtaine as an
excellent time in which to be alive, rich, and sixty years old.
Thoroughly, keenly, ebulliently alive he was. Thoroughly rich, also; and
if the truth be told, rather ebulliently conscious of his wealth. You
could see at a glance that he had paid no usurious interest to Fate on
his success; that his vigor and zest in life remained to him
undiminished. Vitality and a high satisfaction with his environment and
with himself as well placed in it, radiated from his bulky and handsome
person; but it was the vitality that impressed you first: impressed and
warmed you; perhaps warned you, too, on shrewder observation. A gleaming
personality, this. But behind the radiance one surmised fire. Occasion
given, Dr. Surtaine might well be formidable.

The world had been his oyster to open. He had cleaved it wide.
Ill-natured persons hinted, in reference to his business, that he had
used poison rather than the knife wherewith to loosen the stubborn
hinges of the bivalve. Money gives back small echo to the cries of
calumny, however. And Dr. Surtaine's Certina, that infallible and
guaranteed blood-cure, eradicator of all known human ills, "famous
across the map of the world," to use one of its advertising phrases,
under the catchword of "