spring's resurrection. Out in midstream lay the crouching hulk of a
battleship, and its somber gray was the one note that contradicted the
softness of the morning.

Bristoll turned his face again to the interior, where a flood of sun
from the broad window at the back filled the place with eastern light.
He never tired of that room, the library where his chief dispatched
those matters of more urgent business that pursued him even to his home.
It was a room that might have served a potentate as a council-chamber
with its treasury of almost priceless art, yet it reflected everywhere
the quiet of faultless taste and the elegance born of a restrained and
sure discernment.

"And all of it," Carl Bristoll murmured to himself, as he awaited the
coming of its master, "he made for himself in a scant ten years, and he
stands only at the threshold of his career!" That often repeated formula
was a sort of daily tonic with which his ambition reminded itself that
life holds no prize locked behind impossible barriers for him who has
the courage and resolution to grasp it. Yet had he been older he would
have added, "The impossible is only possible to the child of Destiny."

He heard a quiet movement behind him, and turned to find the butler
standing at his elbow with a tray of early mail, into which the
secretary plunged, separating the purely personal from those letters
which the great man saw only through his subordinate's eyes.

"I'm not at all sure, Mr. Bristoll, that the master will rise early,"
volunteered the servant. "He was with his sister until midnight, and
after that Mr. Paul came in and I heard him playing the piano, sir, as
late as three o'clock."