rclay became a powerful
man in this world--one of the few hundred men who divided the
material kingdoms of this earth among them. He was a rich man who was
turning his money into great political power. Senates listened to him,
many courts were his in fee simple, because he had bought and paid for
the men who named the judges; Presidents were glad to know what he
thought, and when he came to the White House, reporters speculated
about the talk that went on behind the doors of the President's room,
and the stock market fluttered. If he desired a law, he paid for it
and got it--not in a coarse illegal way, to be sure, but through the
regular conventional channels of politics, and if he desired to step
on a law, he stepped on it, and a court came running up behind him,
and legalized his transaction. He sneered at reformers, and mocked
God, did John Barclay in those days. He grew arrogant and boastful,
and strutted in his power like a man in liquor with the vain knowledge
that he could increase the population of a state or a group of states,
or he could shrivel the prosperity of a section of the country by his
whim. For by changing a freight rate he could make wheat grow, where
grass had nourished. By changing the rate again, he could beckon back
the wilderness. And yet, how small was his power; here beside him,
cherished as the apple of his eye, was his daughter, a slip of a girl,
with blue eyes and fair hair, whose heart was growing toward the
light, as the hearts of young things grow, and he, with all of his
power, could only watch the mystery, and wonder at it. He was not
displeased at what he saw. But it was one of the few things in his
consciousness over which he could find no way to assume control. He
stood in the presence of something that came from outside of his realm
and ignored him as the sun and the rain and the simple processes of
nature ignored him.

"Jane," he said one night, when he was in the Ridge for the first time
in many weeks,--a night near the end of the summer when Jeanette and
Neal Ward were vaguely feeling their way together, "Jane, mother says
that while we've been away Neal Ward has been here pretty often. You
don't suppose that--"

"Well, I've rather wondered about it myself a little," responded Jane.
"Neal is such a fine handsome young fellow."

"But, Jane," exclaimed Barclay, impatiently, as he rose to walk the
rug, "Jennie is only a child. Why, she's only--"

"Nineteen, John--she's a big