l-stamping mills.

"Take out that bust of Pallas Athene," he ordered, "and stand the mummy
up in its place."

Owen nodded, poised his pencil and prompted:

"You were just dictating about the new piston rings."

Mr. Marvin drew his hand across his eyes and looked out the window.
Within the range of his vision was one of the most charming sights in
the world--a handsome youth and a pretty girl, arrayed in white
flannels, playing tennis.

"Never mind the letters. Tell Harry and Pauline I wish to see them."

Alone, the old man opened a drawer and took a dose of medicine, then he
unfolded Dr. Stevens's letter and read its final paragraph, which
prescribed a change of climate, together with complete and permanent
rest or "I will not answer for the consequences."

There was little doubt that no primer mover in a great industry was
better able to leave its helm than Standford Marvin. His lieutenants
were able, efficient and contented. The factories would go of their
own momentum for a year or two at least, then his son, Harry, just out
of college, should be able, perhaps, to help. His lieutenants had
proved Marvin's unerring instinct in judging character. Not one single
case came to the old employer's mind of a man who had failed to turn
out exactly as he expected. Yet the most trusted man of all, Raymond
Owen, the secretary, was disloyal and dishonest.

This one exception was easily enough explained. When Owen came to
Marvin's attention, fifteen years before, he was a fine, honest,
faithful man. It was born and bred in him to be straight. During the
first five' or six years in the Marvin household the older man took
pains to keep watch on this quiet, tactful youth until he knew all his
ways and even his habits of thought. There was no doubt that Owen was
as upright and clean as the old man himself.

At the age of forty the devil entered into Owen. It came in the form
of insomnia. Loss of sleep will make any man irritable and
unreasonable, but hardly dishonest. With the sleeplessness, however,
came the temptation to take drugs. Owen shifted from one narcotic to
another, finally, settling down upon morphine. Five years of the
opiate had made him its slave. Every physician knows that morphine
fiends become dishonest.

The secretary had speculated with his modest savings and lost them. He
had borrowed and lost again, and now, for some time, had been betting
on horse races. This last had made him acquai