m, but
a small boy who said breathlessly: "Mr. Truscomb wants you to come down
bimeby."

"This evening? To the office?"

"No--he's sick a-bed."

The blood rushed to Amherst's face, and he had to press his lips close
to check an exclamation. "Say I'll come as soon as I've had supper," he
said.

The boy vanished, and Amherst turned back to the sitting-room.
"Truscomb's ill--he has sent for me; and I saw Mrs. Westmore arriving
tonight! Have supper, mother--we won't wait for Duplain." His face still
glowed with excitement, and his eyes were dark with the concentration of
his inward vision.

"Oh, John, John!" Mrs. Amherst sighed, crossing the passage to the
kitchen.

III

AT the manager's door Amherst was met by Mrs. Truscomb, a large flushed
woman in a soiled wrapper and diamond earrings.

"Mr. Truscomb's very sick. He ought not to see you. The doctor thinks--"
she began.

Dr. Disbrow, at this point, emerged from the sitting-room. He was a pale
man, with a beard of mixed grey-and-drab, and a voice of the same
indeterminate quality.

"Good evening, Mr. Amherst. Truscomb is pretty poorly--on the edge of
pneumonia, I'm afraid. As he seems anxious to see you I think you'd
better go up for two minutes--not more, please." He paused, and went on
with a smile: "You won't excite him, of course--nothing unpleasant----"

"He's worried himself sick over that wretched Dillon," Mrs. Truscomb
interposed, draping her wrapper majestically about an indignant bosom.

"That's it--puts too much heart into his work. But we'll have Dillon all
right before long," the physician genially declared.

Mrs. Truscomb, with a reluctant gesture, led Amherst up the handsomely
carpeted stairs to the room where her husband lay, a prey to the cares
of office. She ushered the young man in, and withdrew to the next room,
where he heard her coughing at intervals, as if to remind him that he
was under observation.

The manager of the Westmore mills was not the type of man that Amherst's
comments on his superior suggested. As he sat propped against the
pillows, with a brick-red flush on his cheek-bones, he seemed at first
glance to belong to the innumerable army of American business men--the
sallow, undersized, lacklustre drudges who have never lifted their heads
from the ledger. Even his eye, now bright with fever, was dull and
non-committal in daily life; and perhaps only the ramifications of his
wrinkles could have revealed what particu