k of cheroot factories with a man so little
eligible that he trusted the crows to bring his raiment. In the wide
world was there another person whose life's pendulum, in a twelvemonth,
had swung so wildly far?

Eight o'clock now, by the little clock on the mantel: eight hours and a
half to Mr. Pond's meeting for workers at the old Dabney House. One
needn't be an astronomer to calculate that. And Cally Heth lay wide-eyed
in her great bed, and thought how strange, how wonderful is life....

In the watches her mind had gone back and back over the long year; and
she had marvelled at the tininess of turnings upon which, it was all
clear now, great issues had hung. She could put her finger on time after
time, last year and even this, when the smallest shifting in the course
would have brought her, to-day, far otherwhere. 'Had she said that, had
she done this'.... Was it all the wild caprice of Chance, then, that had
no eyes? Were people so helpless, the slight sport of Luck, thistledown
blowing in the winds of the gods? Ah, but she saw clearer than that. Had
she not felt all along how powerfully this sequence of happening and
encounter had pressed toward far other ends? And the divinity that had
shaped them at last, acting and reacting and giving circumstance a
soul, had been only that mysterious divinity that makes human beings
what they are. There was truth in the saying that destiny is only
character under its other name.

No chance here, surely, that had waked her so still and shining-eyed,
such a wonder in her heart....

She had marked this day for diligent study. Last night an unknown hand
had left at the door a hard-used copy of "The New Factory Idea," by T.B.
Halton. And Cally, at the end of a second long business conference with
her father, had read three chapters of the absorbing work, and slept
upon the resolve to devote this morning to it altogether. But she had
seen at the first look of the flooding sunshine upon the shutters, that
she did not feel studious at all. Let books look to themselves to-day.
Her desire was to be outdoors; to be alone, and to muse awhile. Surely
nobody ever had so much, so much, to think about.

However, as a daughter one wasn't altogether free; nor yet again as a
member of organized society. All day the claims of the familiar
encroached upon the real world within, and thoughts, the radiant aliens,
had to range themselves in as they could.

* * * * *