it. You're not the man we used to know."

"If it's my own affair," came back Manson with growing resentment, "why
not leave it at that? Did you never make any money out of a thing you
didn't believe in?"

"Yes," said Filmer slowly, "I have, but after that I believed in it,
and said so. It was only fair to the fellow behind it."

Manson went stolidly back to his square stone office, where he took out
his broker's statement for the previous month and stared at it
silently. Already he knew the figures by heart. Another two point
rise in Consolidated stock and he would realize his net profit of one
hundred thousand dollars. He ran over his own scribbled figures on the
back of the statement, as he had gone over them many times before.
They were quite right. For weeks past his selling order had been in,
been acknowledged, and now at any moment the thing might be done. It
might even have already been done. The blood rushed to his head at the
thought. How many other chief constables, he wondered, had amassed
fortunes from behind their forbidding gray stone walls? Then he
thought of his wife and children, and his eyes softened, while the
broker's statement in his big hand trembled ever so slightly. He
smiled at that, and it came to his mind that perhaps statements in
other men's hands sometimes trembled at the thought of their wives and
children and the fortunes that--and here Manson felt vaguely
uncomfortable and, getting up, slowly locked his desk.

Just at that moment, Filmer, who had returned to his office, was
sitting staring at a half-section of steel rail that lay in his hand.
It was smooth and highly polished, a thin slice of the very first
product of Clark's last and greatest undertaking. He experienced a
quite extraordinary sensation at feeling the thing, and it snatched his
mind back seven years till again in the Town Hall he heard a magnetic
voice assuring the citizens that the town lacked just three
essentials--experience, money and imagination, and that the speaker
would supply them all. It was a far cry from that evening to the deep
drone of the rail mill, and Filmer, detaching himself from the picture
in which he formed a part, began now to perceive its dramatic vitality.
Were Clark taken out the whole thing seemed to fall to pieces.

And up at the See House, the bishop was examining just such another
section of rail, while the gold of his episcopal ring shone beside the
gray of steel. To him