t became pregnant with
importance. To visitors from Paris, Kentucky, Berlin, Iowa, and Cairo,
Illinois, he confided, "The gentleman by the car with the broken
wind-shield is Hamilton Burton." It was enough. It conjured up to memory
newspaper stories of a genie to whose wand fabulous tides of gold
responded. These sight-seers were beholding a man credited with the
power to cause or avert panics; one of the most lauded, the most hated
and the most feared men in finance, and, for some inexplicable reason,
after they looked at him it was no longer difficult to believe the
stories of his wizardry.

He nodded to Paul and turned toward the door. Once more he repeated,
"Then above me there shall be--no other man," and though he said it with
all the arrogant and ruthless spirit of a tyrant who would take no count
of razed cities as he rode to his victory, yet he said it in a low and
pleasant voice; a voice even tinged with musical gentleness.

At the twentieth floor where the elevator stopped to let him alight,
Hamilton's eyes were aglow with the reflected light of his thoughts. He
was still young and before him lay conquests that should dwarf those of
the past. Posterity should link his name with achievements so titanic
that history would be beggared for a precedent. Kingdoms would be his
clients and kings his vassals.

Of late, a persistent idea had been creeping into his thoughts. The
world was to know him as one of its mightiest rulers--so mighty that for
him a crown would be too tawdry a toy--but some day he must die. Who
then, demanded his sublimely arrogant self-appraisement, would carry on
the work that had called him on to conquest from hills where the burned
stumps stood up stark and black in the forest? It is the hallucination
of superlative egotism to imagine that the world demands of her great
sons--a succession.

Whatever gods looked on must have laughed as they read the vast audacity
of this man's conceit. Never had it occurred to him that such an
ambition as his own meant a mere greed for power--that no great cause or
motive impelled him forward. Never had a whisper come to his soul that
power is a trust which should make its recipient a crusader. The world
thought of him as a man of great potentiality. He thought of himself
grown to the proportions and stature of his dreams--the financial Titan
expanded to the _n_th power. There must be an heir to this empire of
his building.

"I suppose I could marry any