tours of inspection; but Bojo, instinctively, censored the
lithographs on the wall (harmless though they were) and the choice of
novels which his father would be sure to examine with a critical eye.

Klondike, the sweep, arranged the room in military order and Fred
DeLancy was enjoined to observe a bread-and-milk diet. Bojo had an idea
that his father was very stern, rigid, and exact, with the unrelenting
attitude toward folly and leisure which had characterized the Crocker
family in the days of their seven celebrated divines.

"How are you, Tom?" said a chest-voice behind him. "Turn around. You
look in first-class shape. Glad to see you."

"Glad to see you, father," he said hastily, taking the stubby, powerful
hand.

"Just a moment--go on with your cigar. Let me straighten out this desk.
Train was ten minutes late."

"Now it comes," thought Bojo to himself as he gripped his hands and
assumed a determined frown.

As they faced each other they were astonishingly alike and unlike. They
had the same squaring of the brows, the same obstinate rise of the head
at the back, and the prominent undershot jaw. Years had thickened the
frame of the father and written characteristic lines about the mouth and
the eyes. He had become so integral a part of the machine he had created
that in the process all the finer youthful shades of expression had
faded away.

Concentration on a fixed idea, indomitable purpose, decision,
self-discipline were there in the strongly sculptured chin and maxillary
muscles, under the sparse, close-cropped beard shot with gray; courage
and tenacity in the deep eyes, which, like Bojo's, had the disconcerting
fixity of the mastiff's; but the quality of dreams which so keenly
qualified the tempestuous obstinacy of the son had been discarded as so
much superfluous baggage. Life to him was a succession of immediate
necessities, a military progress, and his imagination went with
difficulty beyond the demands of the hour. He dressed in a
pepper-and-salt business suit made of his own product, wore a made-up
tie and comfortable square-toed shoes, with a certain aggressive disdain
for the fashions as a quality of pretentiousness.

He ran through his correspondence in five minutes while Bojo pricked up
his ears at the sums which he flung off without hesitation. Richardson
faded from the room, the father shifted a package of memoranda, turned
the face of his desk clock so he could follow the time, drew back in