tudy close up the
biggest change the world has ever undergone. Those fellows will want
everything, and I'll give them everything I can lay my hands on. I'm
ahead of a lot of jobbers here. I'll pay you well to see I don't get
robbed on that side. Come on. Take a shot at hard facts for a change."

Allen gasped at the salary George mentioned. He hesitated. He went.
George was glad to have helped him. He experienced also an ugly sense of
triumph. He felt that he wanted to tell Squibs Bailly right away.

Sylvia and her mother, he heard later, had come home out of the turmoil,
unacquainted with the discomforts of people who had travelled without
the Planter prestige. Whether the war was to blame or not, she had
returned without a single rumour touching fact. He didn't see her right
away, because she clung to Oakmont. More and more, as his success
multiplied, keeping pace with the agony in Europe, he longed to see her.
All at once a return to Oakmont was, in a sense, forced upon him, but he
went without any thought of encountering Sylvia, hoping, indeed, to
avoid her.

It was like his mother to express her letter with telegraphic bluntness
without, however, going to the expense of actually wiring. Where he had
expected her customary stiff gratitude for money sent he found a
scrawled announcement of his father's death, and her plans for the
funeral the following afternoon.

"Of course you won't come," she ended.

Yet it seemed to him that he should go, to arrange her future. This was
the moment to snap the last enslaving tie between the Mortons and
Oakmont. There was, of course, the chance of running into Sylvia, or
some visitor who might connect him with the little house. Suppose
Dalrymple, for example, should be staying with the Planters as he often
did? George shrugged his shoulders. Things were coming rather rapidly to
him. Besides, it was extremely unlikely that any one from the great
house would see the Morton ceremony. The instincts of those people
would be to avoid such sights.

V

About his return there was a compelling thrill. He drove from the
station in one of the cheap automobiles that had made his father
practically a pensioner of the Planters. With an incredulous
appreciation that he had once accepted its horizon as the boundary of
his life, he examined the familiar landscape and the scar made upon it
by the village. Curtly he refused to satisfy the driver's curiosity. He
had some business at the littl