had to sell, but he insisted on all commissions, promoter's profits, gratuities and perquisites being made over to him before he would talk busi

ness.

He squeezed one poor Cripple Creek gold miner, with a daughter to sell, so ruthlessly that when young Charley brought home his new wife they said in the bank that he sweated beads of gold ore, like roasted quartz, for a year after the wedding.

Among the dummy bank directors who bought the Herrington assets at Charley's bidding the bride was known as the incontrovertible asset; but the bridegroom kept her most of the time in Europe or in New York, where her father's name was well known in financial circles, and used her as a sort of daily New York balance. In the middle of the nineties Herrington left the Southwest as a hunting ground, partly because of certain wide areas where he could not go without danger of arrest or of summons to suits for damages.

He opened an office a rather modest office on Lower Broad Street in New York as a broker in Western securities, and also had the

name of his Missouri Valley Bank printed on his office door.

In New Raynham he remained Charley Herrington, of the First National; and because there came into the town in due course, but on rare occasions, riding a Shetland pony with much pomp, a grandson of the Cripple Creek Bonanza King, known as little Charley Herrington, the father, still in his forties, became known as Old Charley Herrington. He was gray before he was fifty; his face took on a granite cast, and his eyes were sharp and keen and hard.

He was a liberal giver to all the town institutions that begged their way: the churches, the Y. M. C. A., the public library, the band, the Christmas fund of the lodges. And he was an affable, amiable, smiling, half lovable, altogether lonely sort of fellow, who kept so far aloof from the town's business and political factions as to have few enemies. Yet he estimated everything in terms of dollars. It was worth what it would bring, or if not, it was worth the money invested in it. He was as joyless and taciturn about his money to his associates in business as he was about everything else; but, as a matter of fact, everything else

of his life covered a small area. He had quit reading books because he found things in them that irritated the scalded spot in his soul. He had scarcely been a part of the social activities of his town for something like the same reason. Men said he was inordinately modest and selfeffacing; but he feared fame too — - just as he feared to go to court to assert his rights in business deals.

Time and again he was about to make a boast of the fact that he had never had a lawsuit, but he always saw to what exception the boast would lead him and refrained from it. At home in New Raynham he took no leading part in anything, for fear he would call down criticism on himself; and away from home he avoided newspaper notoriety, and always met former citizens of his home town with diffidence and obvious constraint. The scalded spot on his soul, instead of healing and growing smaller, began to eat; and its infection began to sink deeper into his life.

As for his wife and the transient home they kept, she and the home did not help matters for Herrington. The wife was a noisy, extreme sort of person, whose figure changed with the modes,

and who loved to play the aristocrat on the townspeople, whom she called the natives. She drew about her a fast and rather impossible young set, and hooted at the attempts of the women in the town who tried to better conditions through the City Federation, the Library Board and the Civic Improvement League.

So the Herringtons remained an alien family in their home town a social anomaly. a social anomaly. Thus, in his middle fifties, when thirty years' living with the gnawing ulcer on his soul had made its symptoms a part of his life, Charley Herrington was a repressed, colourless, wiry, white-haired, flintvisaged man, with suspicious, furtive eyes, one of which was curtained by a cynical drooping lid. He gave the impression of one living with underspiritual nourishment, without having a wicked face. He looked morally hungry. His reckless manner fooled no one into thinking him brave. He was eager without enthusiasm, and often revealed a flashing, greedy desire for some commonplace of human companionship that disclosed the lonesome, unspent life he had lived. The soul that shone through his emotionless face was not the mildly blanching soul of one leaving youth for a

higher state, but the charred soul of a quenched fire.

It was in those days of his middle fifties that he bought the whole block of ground, once far out in the sunflowers, a part of which was the little lot where the Haydens had lived - - though only a few very old settlers remembered that and on the block he put up the great Colonial mansion that is the town's pride to-day, a building more awful in its solemn lines than the courthouse, more splendid than the five-story hotel, more gorgeous than the Y. M. C. A., more impressive than even the ten-story First National Bank Building.

This Colonial mansion, set among great trees that came to the town from afar on flat cars and made the town gasp for weeks, is surrounded by beautiful gardens and by flowers the very names of which are strange to the population of New Raynham; but the thing about the house that really paralysed the town, rendering it speechless and setting it in its low place in the universe far below the exalted Herringtons

was not the house

itself, but a detail of its construction. To begin

with, a contractor from Chicago did the work