to some conclusion as to what Heaven is. Let us call it, for
the sake of our hypothesis, the most work one can do for the least
self-interest, and let it go at that and get on with the story. For this
story has to do with large and real affairs. It must not dally here with
the sordid affairs of a lady who certainly was no better than she should
be and of a gentleman who was as the hereinbefore mentioned receipts
will show, much worse than he might have been.

CHAPTER XXXV

THE ODD SPIDER BEGINS TO DIVIDE HIS FLIES WITH OTHERS AND GEORGE
BROTHERTON IS PUZZLED TWICE IN ONE NIGHT

Now it was in the year of these minor conquests when Henry Fenn and
Violet Hogan were enjoying their little Heavens that great things began
to stir in Harvey and the Wahoo Valley. In May a young gentleman in a
high hat and a suit of exquisite gray twill cut with a long frock coat,
appeared at the Hotel Sands--and took the bridal suite on the second
floor. He brought letters to the Traders' Bank and from the Bank took
letters to the smelters, and with a notebook in hand the young man in
exquisite gray twill went about for three or four days smiling affably,
and asking many questions. Then he left and in due course--that is to
say, in a fortnight--Mr. Sands called the managing officials of all the
smelters into his back room and read them a letter from a New York firm
offering to trade stock in a holding company, taking over smelters of
the class and kind in the Wahoo Valley for the stocks and bonds of the
Harvey Smelters Company. The letterhead was so awe-inspiring and the
proposition was so convincing by reason of the terror inherent in the
letterhead that the smelters went into the holding company, and
thereafter the managing officials who had been men of power and
consequence in Harvey became clerks. About the same time the coal
properties went the same way, and the cement concerns saw their finish
as individual competing concerns. The glass factories were also gobbled
up. So when the Fourth of July came and the youngest Miss Morton, under
great protest, but at her father's stern command, wrapped an American
flag about her--and sang the "Star Spangled Banner" to the Veterans of
Persifer F. Smith Post of the G.A.R. in Sands'

Park, the land of the free and the home of the brave in Harvey was
somewhat abridged.

Daniel Sands felt the abridgement more than any one else. For a
generation he had been a spider, weaving his own web for h