ld, certainly, but it was always Alexander's
picture that the Sunday Supplement men wanted, because he looked as a
tamer of rivers ought to look. Under his tumbled sandy hair his head
seemed as hard and powerful as a catapult, and his shoulders looked
strong enough in themselves to support a span of any one of his ten
great bridges that cut the air above as many rivers.

After dinner Alexander took Wilson up to his study. It was a large room
over the library, and looked out upon the black river and the row of
white lights along the Cambridge Embankment. The room was not at all
what one might expect of an engineer's study. Wilson felt at once
the harmony of beautiful things that have lived long together without
obtrusions of ugliness or change. It was none of Alexander's doing, of
course; those warm consonances of color had been blending and mellowing
before he was born. But the wonder was that he was not out of place
there,--that it all seemed to glow like the inevitable background for
his vigor and vehemence. He sat before the fire, his shoulders deep in
the cushions of his chair, his powerful head upright, his hair rumpled
above his broad forehead. He sat heavily, a cigar in his large, smooth
hand, a flush of after-dinner color in his face, which wind and sun and
exposure to all sorts of weather had left fair and clear-skinned.

"You are off for England on Saturday, Bartley, Mrs. Alexander tells me."

"Yes, for a few weeks only. There's a meeting of British engineers, and
I'm doing another bridge in Canada, you know."

"Oh, every one knows about that. And it was in Canada that you met your
wife, wasn't it?"

"Yes, at Allway. She was visiting her great-aunt there. A most remarkable
old lady. I was working with MacKeller then, an old Scotch engineer who
had picked me up in London and taken me back to Quebec with him. He had
the contract for the Allway Bridge, but before he began work on it he
found out that he was going to die, and he advised the committee to turn
the job over to me. Otherwise I'd never have got anything good so early.
MacKeller was an old friend of Mrs. Pemberton, Winifred's aunt. He had
mentioned me to her, so when I went to Allway she asked me to come to
see her. She was a wonderful old lady."

"Like her niece?" Wilson queried.

Bartley laughed. "She had been very handsome, but not in Winifred's way.
When I knew her she was little and fragile, very pink and white, with
a splendid head and a