Many
times, after a bad hour spent in a futile defense against the only
half-perceptible hostility of O'Connor, he would find himself seriously
questioning whether he would not do more wisely to leave the Guardian
and hazard a new fortune in another field. Yet all the while he knew
that this course of speculation was idle and a waste of time and
cerebral tissues. He was a Guardian man, and with the Guardian he was
going to stay--unless the Company itself took a different view. Of
course there was a time coming when Mr. Wintermuth would lay down his
badge of office, but before that time much would occur. Sufficient
unto that day would be its own evil, without enhancing it by imaginary
additions. So Smith stood by his post, but there was at times an
expression in his face which gave F. Mills O'Connor himself cause for
careful consideration.

But to Darius Howell, somewhat awkwardly saying good-by at the
Guardian's door, Smith's smile was as sunny as the skies of Schuyler,
Maine. For troubles often turned out to be largely imaginary, while
Darius was indubitably real.

CHAPTER VI

Promptly at nine o'clock in the morning of every business day for fifteen
years, Hannibal G. Pelgram, uncle of Stanwood Pelgram, had seated himself
at his desk in the office of the Pelgram Plumbers' Supply Company, and it
was rarely that he left before his stenographer had begun to show signs
of impatience and anxiety. But in the sixteenth year of his reign his
liver, which up to that time had acted with the most commendable
regularity, began to develop alarming eccentricities of behavior. Mr.
Pelgram became gradually less certain in his attendance, and finally his
struggle with the refractory liver ended in the victory of that
inconspicuous but important organ, and he passed peacefully away at a
German spa in the course of taking a cure which would very likely have
killed him even had he been in perfectly normal health.

His will began by the customary direction to his executor to pay his just
debts and funeral expenses--exactly as though the executor was assumed to
be a thoroughly unscrupulous person who, although not benefiting himself
in the least by his dishonesty, would try in every possible way to evade
settlement with all the dead man's legitimate creditors, including the
undertaker. Then he left a small bequest to a faithful cook and another
to an endowed retreat for tuberculous Baptists which already had more
money