sizeable place, you know. A wing for house-parties, and--that sort of
thing."

Clayton's eyes roamed about the room, where portly Mrs. Haverford was
still knitting placidly, where the Chris Valentines were quarreling
under pretense of raillery, where Toots Hayden was smoking a cigaret
in a corner and smiling up at Graham, and where Natalie, exquisite and
precise, was supervising the laying out of a bridge table.

"She would, of course," he observed, rather curtly, and, moving through
a French window, went out onto a small balcony into the night.

He was irritated with himself. What had come over him? He shook himself,
and drew a long breath of the sweet night air. His tall, boyishly
straight figure dominated the little place. In the half-light he looked,
indeed, like an overgrown boy. He always looked like Graham's brother,
anyhow; it was one of Natalie's complaints against him. But he put the
thought of Natalie away, along with his new discontent. By George, it
was something to feel that, if a man could not fight in this war, at
least he could make shells to help end it. Oblivious to the laughter in
the room behind him, the clink of glass as whiskey-and-soda was
brought in, he planned there in the darkness, new organization, new
expansions--and found in it a great content.

He was proud of his mills. They were his, of his making. The small
iron foundry of his father's building had developed into the colossal
furnaces that night after night lighted the down-town district like a
great conflagration. He was proud of his mills and of his men. He liked
to take men and see them work out his judgment of them. He was not often
wrong. Take that room behind him: Rodney Page, dilettante, liked by
women, who called him "Roddie," a trifle unscrupulous but not entirely
a knave, the sort of man one trusted with everything but one's wife;
Chris, too--only he let married women alone, and forgot to pay back the
money he borrowed. There was only one man in the room about whom he was
beginning to mistrust his judgment, and that was his own son.

Perhaps it was because he had so recently come from lands where millions
of boys like Graham were pouring out their young lives like wine, that
Clayton Spencer was seeing Graham with a new vision. He turned and
glanced back into the drawing-room, where Graham, in the center of that
misfit group and not quite himself, was stooping over Marion Hayden.
They would have to face that, of course, th