woman in the world I wanted," he reflected
as he strode along the hall to the door of his office suite, "but the
devil of it is I don't want any of them." A fresh thought brought to his
face an expression a shade saner and less self-centered. "Mary is as
beautiful and as charming as I am efficient, moreover she has brains,"
he soliloquized. "Mary must marry brilliantly and her son shall be my
successor."

In a sort of audience hall waited the Coal and Ore directors who had
been burning up valuable time and burning up as well a patience
unschooled to such delays, but as the door opened and the young field
marshal of great business appeared on the threshold, they masked their
irritation in smiles. These men were neither sycophants nor fawning
suppliants. Each of them held high prominence in the aristocracy of
wealth, but Hamilton Burton topped them--and the singular power upon
which he had risen was one-half pure charm and hypnotism of personality.
Men might swear at the Hamilton Burton who kept them twiddling their
thumbs until he came, yet _when_ he came it seemed that the sunlight
came with him and the mists of impatience were dissipated. A half-hour
later he bowed them out, and they went smiling and telling one another
as they left, "Remarkable fellow, Burton! Absolutely surmounts ordinary
rules and ordinary difficulties. Most remarkable and able man!"

He next passed through the outer offices to the door marked "private,"
and there, near the window of his sanctum, sat a stout and elderly
gentleman. In the unsparing revelation of the morning sunshine the
visitor's face declared all its wrinkles. The whitening hair, growing
sparse, was carefully combed across an arid patch of scalp. Hamilton
Burton's smile died and his face grew for a moment solicitous as he read
his father's troubled eyes. Old Thomas Burton was shaven and manicured
and betailored into a model of well-nourished--possibly
over-nourished--senectitude. His mustaches and beard were waxed and
pointed. Once he had deplored the necessity and trouble of the Sabbath
shave--and his hair had known no law of shears or shampoo. In his lapel
a gardenia was carefully placed so that it should not obscure the button
which proclaimed him a Son of the American Revolution. He restlessly
tapped his gaitered boots with a stick upon whose gold head was carven
the Burton crest.

As Hamilton came forward the elder man rose and turned with some
embarrassment. In his movement