ege-mates
fondly called him, now dreamed of nothing but Alice Worthington's
golden hair and sapphire blue eyes, as the cable-car bore him swiftly
downward to the office of Hatch & Ferris, at 105 Broad Street.

Seven years older than Clayton, the already successful lawyer
recalled on his way the first confidences of the great capitalist,
when Clayton was sent into Manhattan Island business whirlpool.

The silver-haired Detroit widower had forgotten that even New York
City lawyers have hearts, when he had frankly admitted to Ferris
the reasons for detaching Randall Clayton from his own household.

"You see, Ferris," reminiscently said the money magnate, "I owed
my own rise to Clayton's ambitious father. When he retired from
the old firm of Clayton & Worthington, Everett Clayton had a cool
million. It was 'big money' in the days of seventy. But, plunging
into a new railway with an end left hanging out on the wild prairies,
the panic of '72 soon carried Clayton down.

"When he died, out West, I helped the orphan lad along. There was
no trouble until Randall became an inmate of my household, after
his graduation.

"I woke up, however, one day to find that my little Alice had leaped
into womanhood at a bound. And so I have decided to push Clayton's
fortunes from a safe distance. For, the social freedom of the
college lad and the schoolgirl in short frocks cannot be allowed
to the man of twenty-four and the blossoming girl of sixteen."

Hugh Worthington, giving over his protege to the watchful care of
Arthur Ferris, old beyond his years, never realized the boundless
ambitions of the aspiring New York lawyer.

Ferris, with an eye ambitiously fixed upon the Senate of the United
States, had quickly become a living spirit of boundless energy in
the Western Trading Company's service, and Miss Alice Worthington,
on her New York visits, a girlish tyro, saw only the man, and not
the lawyer, in her accomplished metropolitan cavalier.

And so the coming young advocate's heart bounded with delight at
the six-weeks' future companionship of the woman whose unguarded
heart had silently drifted toward him "along the line of least
resistance."

Arthur Ferris burned now to make his calling and election sure, before
this "round the world" trip should present an endless succession
of fortune hunters to the gaze of the Detroit heiress.

Clayton, hastening back toward the office, was only intent upon
the answer to his chief's despatch