as possible, and thought again and again upon his father;
of how he had sat day after day in this stately dining-hall, honored
and venerated among these men who were striving still for the ideal
that he had attained. It was a good thought, and made for pride of the
right sort. With the entree Mr. Trimmer ordered his favorite vintage
champagne, and, as it boiled up like molten amber in the glasses, so
sturdily that the center of the surface kept constantly a full quarter
of an inch above the sides, he waited anxiously for Bobby to sample
it. Even Bobby, long since disillusioned of such things and grown
abstemious from healthy choice, after a critical taste sipped slowly
again and again.

"That's ripping good wine," he acknowledged.

"There's only a little over two hundred bottles of it left in the
world," Mr. Trimmer assured him, and then he waited for that first
glass to exert its warming glow. He was a good waiter, was Silas
Trimmer, and keenly sensitive to personal influences. He knew that
Bobby had not been in entire harmony with him at any period of the
evening, but after the roast came on--a most careful roast, indeed,
prepared under a certain formula upon which Mr. Trimmer had
painstakingly insisted--he saw that he had really found his way for a
moment to Bobby's heart through the channel provided by Nature for
attacks upon masculine sympathy, and at that moment he leaned forward
with his circular smile, and observed:

"By the way, Mr. Burnit, I suppose your father often discussed with
you the great plan we evolved for the Burnit-Trimmer Arcade?"

Bobby almost blushed at the confession he must make.

"I'm sorry to say that he didn't," he owned. "I never took the
interest in such things that I ought, and so I missed a lot of
confidences I'd like to have had now."

"Too bad," sympathized Mr. Trimmer, now quite sure of his ground,
since he had found that Bobby was not posted. "It was a splendid plan
we had. You know, your building and mine are precisely the same width
and precisely in a line with each other, back to back, with only the
alley separating us, the Trimmer establishment fronting on Market
Street and the Burnit building on Grand. The alley is fully five feet
below our two floor lines, and we could, I am quite sure, get
permission to bridge it at a clearance of not to exceed twelve feet.
By raising the rear departments of your store and of mine a foot or
so, and then building a flight of broad, easy