y-third Street was jammed with a string of
delivery waggons from the department stores whose growth had crushed a
hundred small trades. The clang of the cars proclaimed the Street
Railway Merger and a skyscraper called "The Flatiron" was just raising
its giant frame on the little triangle where a half-dozen old-fashioned
buildings had stood for generations. Across Madison Square the
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company was tearing down a whole block,
section by section, and a palace of white marble was slowly rearing its
huge form. The passing of an era was plain. He could see the hand of
the new mysterious power building a world before his very eyes. Strange
he hadn't noticed it until Bivens's dark sneering face this morning,
insolent in its conscious strength, had opened his eyes. What chance
had his old friend Woodman against such forces?

Yet why should he resent them personally? He was young. The future was
his--not the past. He didn't resent them. Of course not. What he did
resent was the approach of the particular Juggernaut named John C.
Calhoun Bivens toward the woman he loved. That Bivens should fall
hopelessly and blindly in love with Nan at first sight was too
stupefying to be grasped at once. She couldn't love such a man--and yet
his millions and that slippery mother were a sinister combination. He
congratulated himself that his interview with Bivens had put him in
possession of a most important secret, and he would force the issue at
once.

By evening he had thrown off his depression and met Nan with something
of his old gaiety, to which she responded with a touch of coquetry.

"Tell me, Jim," she began with a smile of mischief in her eyes, "why
you called at the remarkable hour of twelve noon, to-day? Am I becoming
so resistless that work no longer has any charms? You must have
something very important to say?" Her eyes danced with the
consciousness of her advantage.

"Yes. I have, Nan," he answered soberly, taking her hand. "I want a
public announcement of our engagement in to-morrow morning's papers."

"Jim!"

"I mean it."

"But why? You know the one concession, the only one I have ever made to
my mother's hostility to you, is that our engagement shall be kept a
secret until we are ready to marry. We must play fair."

"I will, we are ready now."

Nan's voice broke into a ripple of laughter.

"Oh, are we?--I didn't know it."

"Yes, that's what I came to tell you," Stuart went on, catching he