places.




CHAPTER IV

THE SHOP


Certina had found its first modest home in Worthington on a side street.
As the business grew, the staid tenement which housed it expanded and
drew to itself neighboring buildings, until it eventually gave way to
the largest, finest, and most up-to-date office edifice in the city.
None too large, fine, or modern was this last word in architecture for
the triumphant nostrum and the minor medical enterprises allied to it.
For though Certina alone bore the name and spread the fame and features
of its inventor abroad in the land, many lesser experiments had bloomed
into success under the fertilizing genius of the master-quack.

Inanimate machinery, when it runs sweetly, gives forth a definite
tone, the bee-song of work happily consummated. So this great human
mechanism seemed, to Harrington Surtaine as he entered the realm of
its activities, moving to music personal to itself. Through its wide
halls he wandered, past humming workrooms, up spacious stairways,
resonant to the tread of brisk feet, until he reached the fifth floor
where cluster the main offices. Here through a succession of open
doors he caught a glimpse of the engineer who controlled all these
lively processes, leaning easily back from his desk, fresh, suavely
groomed, smiling, an embodiment of perfect satisfaction. Before Dr.