place-seekers out of a job, Ford was almost relieved to find
only a closed desk, and a young man absently scanning a morning paper.

Inquiry developed a few facts, tersely stated but none the less
enlightening. Mr. Colbrith was not in: the office was merely his nominal
headquarters in the city and he occupied it only occasionally. His
residence? It was in the Borough of the Bronx, pretty well up toward
Yonkers--locality and means of access obligingly written out on a card
for the caller by the clerk. Was Mr. Ford's business of a routine
nature? If so, perhaps, Mr. Ten Eyck, the general agent, could attend to
it. Ford said it was not of a routine nature, and made his escape to
inquire his way to the nearest subway station. To pause now was to lose
the precious impetus of the start.

It was worth something to be whirled away blindly out of the stifling
human vortex of the lower city; but Ford's first glimpse of the Colbrith
mansion depressed him again. The huge, formal house had once been the
country residence of a retired dry-goods merchant. It fronted the river
brazenly, and the fine old trees of a ten-acre park shamed its
architectural stiffness. Ford knew the president a little by family
repute and more particularly as a young subordinate knows the general in
command. It struck him forcibly that the aspect of the house fitted the
man. With the broad river and the distant Palisades to be dwelt upon,
its outlook windows were narrow. With the sloping park and the great
trees to give it dignity, it seemed to assume an artificial, plumb-line
dignity of its own, impressive only as the product of rigid measurements
and mechanical uprightness.

From the boulevard there was a gravelled driveway with a stone portal.
The iron gates were thrown wide, and at his entrance Ford stood aside to
let an outgoing auto-car have the right of way. Being full of his
errand, and of the abstraction of a depressed soul, Ford merely remarked
that there were two persons in the car; a young man driving, and a young
woman, veiled and dust-coated, in the mechanician's seat beside him.
None the less, there floated out of the mist of abstraction an instantly
vanishing phantom of half-recognition for the Westerner. Something in
the pose of the young woman, the way she leaned forward and held her hat
with the tips of her gloved fingers, was, for the fleeting moment,
almost reminiscent.

If Ford had wished to speculate upon abstruse problems of ident