wouldn' give 't, sir.”

The great man's expression changed slightly; it was as if he had suddenly remembered something. He turned to the desk and fingered the papers for a moment.

“We will take up this matter after lunch, Mr. Babcock.”

He spoke a shade more pompously than was his wont in dealing with his junior.

Mr. Babcock bowed and went out. Then Mr. Bigelow turned to his stenographer, who was clicking away by the window.

“Miss Brown, I wish you would go out to the files and look up all the Pine Lands correspondence for me.”

The stenographer laid aside her work and went out.

And now Mr. Bigelow, once more bland and gracious, turned to the boy who was holding fast to the bronze door-knob.

“Here, boy, you may show the lady in.”

Having said this, he bent over a letter and was so busy that he seemed not to hear the woman enter. For some moments she stood there by the closed door. Once she coughed timidly; and even that failed to reach the attention of the much-absorbed man. But at last the letter was laid down and Mr. Bigelow turned.

“Sit down,” he said, motioning to the chair that Mr. Babcock had just now vacated.

But the woman, it seemed, preferred to stand. “Why have you come here?”

“I think you know why I have come.”

Mr. Bigelow took up the letter again and regarded it closely. A great many thoughts apparently were passing through his mind--thoughts not of Kentucky Coal and New Freighters, but of a stately suburban home of granite completed within the year; of a certain Mrs. Bigelow who was rising rapidly toward the social leadership of her suburb, and was carrying Mr. G. Hyde Bigelow into circles that he, with all his prestige of a sort, could hardly have penetrated alone; of a certain dignified, comfortable, downright conservative suburban church, where the Bigelow money and judgment, new as they were in such surroundings, were undoubtedly earning a place; and, lastly, of certain small Bigelows. Of all these things thought Mr. Bigelow.

“Well,” he said at length, without raising his eyes, “what is it now? What do you want?”

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