man's character, however, and at heart, he
was coarse, brutal almost to savagery, without consideration for others,
and as a result often cruelly unjust to his helpless subordinates.

In moments of temper, which were not infrequent, his face turned a dull
purple, while the top of his bald head shone by contrast like white
marble, and the bags under his eyes swelled till it seemed they would
presently explode with a pop. And at these times he presented a
distinctly repulsive appearance.

But to a private secretary like Jones, who did his duty regardless of
whether his employer was beast or angel, and whose mainspring was
principle and not emotion, this made little difference. Within the
narrow limits in which any one _could_ satisfy such a man, he pleased
the General Manager; and more than once his piercing intuitive faculty,
amounting almost to clairvoyance, assisted the chief in a fashion that
served to bring the two closer together than might otherwise have
been the case, and caused the man to respect in his assistant a power
of which he possessed not even the germ himself. It was a curious
relationship that grew up between the two, and the cashier, who enjoyed
the credit of having made the selection, profited by it indirectly as
much as any one else.

So for some time the work of the office continued normally and very
prosperously. John Enderby Jones received a good salary, and in the
outward appearance of the two chief characters in this history there
was little change noticeable, except that the Manager grew fatter and
redder, and the secretary observed that his own hair was beginning to
show rather greyish at the temples.

There were, however, two changes in progress, and they both had to do
with Jones, and are important to mention.

One was that he began to dream evilly. In the region of deep sleep,
where the possibility of significant dreaming first develops itself, he
was tormented more and more with vivid scenes and pictures in which a
tall thin man, dark and sinister of countenance, and with bad eyes, was
closely associated with himself. Only the setting was that of a past
age, with costumes of centuries gone by, and the scenes had to do with
dreadful cruelties that could not belong to modern life as he knew it.

The other change was also significant, but is not so easy to describe,
for he had in fact become aware that some new portion of himself,
hitherto unawakened, had stirred slowly into life out o