or you than for me. But the fair Esme can always spare
one of those smiles for anything that wears trousers."

Hal moved uneasily. He felt a sense of discord. As he cast about for a
topic to shift to, the Elliot car rolled ahead slowly, and once more he
caught the woodsy perfume of the pink bloom. Strangely and satisfyingly
to his quickened perceptions, it seemed to express the quality of the
wearer. Despite her bearing of worldly self-assurance, despite the
atmosphere of modishness about her, there was in her charm something
wild and vivid, vernal and remote, like the arbutus which, alone among
flowers, keeps its life-secret virgin and inviolate, resisting all
endeavors to make it bloom except in its own way and in its own chosen
places.

CHAPTER IV

THE SHOP

Certina had found its first modest home in Worthington on a side street.
As the business grew, the staid tenement which housed it expanded and
drew to itself neighboring buildings, until it eventually gave way to
the largest, finest, and most up-to-date office edifice in the city.
None too large, fine, or modern was this last word in architecture for
the triumphant nostrum and the minor medical enterprises allied to it.
For though Certina alone bore the name and spread the fame and features
of its inventor abroad in the land, many lesser experiments had bloomed
into success under the fertilizing genius of the master-quack.

Inanimate machinery, when it runs sweetly, gives forth a definite
tone, the bee-song of work happily consummated. So this great human
mechanism seemed, to Harrington Surtaine as he entered the realm of
its activities, moving to music personal to itself. Through its wide
halls he wandered, past humming workrooms, up spacious stairways,
resonant to the tread of brisk feet, until he reached the fifth floor
where cluster the main offices. Here through a succession of open
doors he caught a glimpse of the engineer who controlled all these
lively processes, leaning easily back from his desk, fresh, suavely
groomed, smiling, an embodiment of perfect satisfaction. Before Dr.
Surtaine lay many sheaves of paper, in rigid order. A stenographer sat
in a far corner, making notes. From beyond a side door came the
precise, faint clicking of a typewriter. The room possessed an
atmosphere of calm and poise; but not of restfulness. At once and
emphatically it impressed the visitor with a sense that it was a place
where things were done, and done e