ascinating scents and
cross-trails, for a stuffy business office, lifted his wrinkling pink
nose and snuffled with acute and hopeful inquiry.

Never had John Valiant's innocuous and butterfly existence known a
surprise more startling. He had swung into the room with all the
nonchalant habits, the ingrained certitude of the man born with
achievement ready-made in his hands. And a single curt statement--like
the ruthless blades of a pair of shears--had snipped across the one
splendid scarlet thread in the woof that constituted life as he knew it.
He had knotted his lavender scarf that morning a vice-president of
the Valiant Corporation--one of the greatest and most successful of
modern-day organizations; he sat now in the fading afternoon trying to
realize that the huge fabric, without warning, had toppled to its fall.

With every nerve of his six feet of manhood in rebellion, he rose and
strode to the half-opened window, through which sifted the smell of
growing things--for the great building fronted the square--and the soft
alluring moistness of early spring. "Failed!" he repeated helplessly,
and the echo seemed to go flittering about the substantial walls like a
derisive India-rubber bat on a spree.

The bulldog sat up, thumping the rug with a vibrant tail. There was
some mistake, surely; one went out by the door, not by the window! He
rose, picked up the Panama in his mouth, and padding across the rug,
poked it tentatively into his master's hand. But no, the hand made no
response. Clearly they were not to go out, and he dropped it and went
puzzledly back and lay down with pricked ears, while his master stared
out into the foliaged day.

How solid and changeless it had always seemed--that great business
fabric woven by the father he could so dimly remember! His own invested
fortune had been derived from the great corporation the elder Valiant
had founded and controlled until his death. With almost unprecedented
earnings, it had stood as a very Gibraltar of finance, a type and sign
of brilliant organization. Now, on the heels of a trust's dissolution
which would be a nine-days' wonder, the vast structure had crumpled up
like a cardboard. The rains had descended and the floods had come, and
it had fallen!

The man at the desk had wheeled in his revolving chair and was looking
at the trim athletic back blotting the daylight, with a smile that was
little short of a covert sneer. He was one of the local managers of
th