The wonderful change in a girl who, through her love, has become all woman, that was the marvel to Bobby; the breadth of her knowledge, the depth of her sympathy, the boundlessness of her compassionate forgiveness, her quality of motherliness; and this last was perhaps the greatest marvel of all. Yet even his marveling did not encompass all the wonder. In his last exploit, more full of folly than anything into which he had yet blundered, and the one which, of all others, might most have turned her from him, Agnes had had the harder part; to sit at home and wait, to dread she knew not what. The certainty which finally evolved had less of distress in it than not to know while day by day passed by. One thing had made it easier: never for one moment had she lost faith in Bobby, in any way. She was certain, however, that financially his trip would be a losing one, and from the time he left she kept her mind almost constantly upon the thought of his future. She had become almost desperately anxious for him to fulfill the hopes of his father, and day by day she studied the commercial field as she had never thought it possible that she could do. There was no line of industry upon which she did not ponder, and there was scarcely any morning that she did not at the breakfast table ask Dan Elliston the ins and outs of some business. If he was not able to tell her all she wanted to know, she usually commissioned him to find out. He took these requests in good part, and if she accomplished nothing else by all her inquiries she acquired such a commercial education as falls to the lot of but few home-kept young women.

One morning her uncle came down a trifle late for breakfast and was in a hurry.

“The Elliston School of Commercial Instruction will have a recess for this session,” he observed as he popped into his chair. “I have an important engagement at the factory this morning and have about seven minutes for breakfast. During that seven minutes I prefer to eat rather than to talk. However, I do not object to listening. This being my last word except to request you to gather things closely about my plate, you may now start.”

“Very well,” said she, dimpling as she usually did at any evidence of briskness on the part of her Uncle Dan, for from long experience she knew the harmlessness of his bark. “Nick Allstyne happened to remark to me last night that the Bulletin is for sale. What do you think of the newspaper business for Bobby?”

“The time necessary to answer that question takes my orange from me,” objected Uncle Dan as he hastily sipped another bite of the fruit and pushed it away. “The newspaper business for Bobby!” He drew the muffins toward him and took one upon his plate, then he stopped and pondered a moment. “Do you know,” said he, “that’s about the best suggestion you’ve made. I believe he could make a hummer out of a newspaper. I’ve noticed this about the boy’s failures; they have all of them been due to lack of experience; none of them has been due to any absence of backbone. Nobody has ever bluffed him.”

Agnes softly clapped her hands.

“Exactly!” she cried. “Well, Uncle Dan, this is the last word I’m going to say. For the balance of your seven minutes I’m going to help stuff you with enough food to keep you until luncheon time; but sometime to-day, if you find time, I want you to go over and see the proprietor of the Bulletin and find out how much he wants for his property, and investigate it as a business proposition just the same as if you were going into it yourself.”

Uncle Dan, dipping voraciously into his soft boiled eggs, grinned and said: “Huh!” Then he looked at his watch. When he came home to dinner, however, he hunted up Agnes at once.

“Your Bulletin proposition looks pretty good,” he told her. “I saw Greenleaf. He’s a physical wreck and has been for two years. He has to get away or die. Moreover, his physical condition has reacted upon his paper. His circulation has run down, but he has a magnificent plant and a good office organization. He wants two hundred thousand dollars for his plant, good will and franchises. I’m going to investigate this a little further. Do you suppose Bobby will have two hundred thousand left when he gets through with grand opera?”

“I hope so,” replied Agnes; “but if he hasn’t I’ll have him waste the balance of this two hundred and fifty thousand so that he can draw the next one.”

Uncle Dan laughed in huge enjoyment of this solution.

“You surely were cut out for high finance,” he told her.

She smiled, and was silent a while, hesitating.

“You seem to think pretty well of the business as a business proposition,” she ventured anxiously, by and by; “but you haven’t told me what you think of it as applicable to Bobby.”

“If he’ll take you in the office with him, he’ll do all right,” he answered her banteringly; but when he went up-stairs and found his wife he said: “Constance, if that girl don’t pull Bobby Burnit through his puppyhood in good shape there is something wrong with the scheme of creation. There is something about you women of the Elliston family that every once in a while makes me pause and reverence the Almighty,” whereupon Aunt Constance flushed prettily, as became her.

With the same earnestness of purpose Agnes handled the question of Bobby’s breach-of-promise suit in so far as it affected his social reception. The Ellistons went to the theater and sat in a box to exhibit him on the second night after his return, and Agnes took careful count of all the people she knew who attended the theater that night. The next day she went to see all of them, among others Mrs. Horace Wickersham, whose social word was social law.

“My dear,” said the redoubtable Mrs. Wickersham, “it does Bobby Burnit great credit that he did not marry the creature. Of course I shall invite him to our affair next Friday night.”

After that there could be no further question of Bobby’s standing, though without the firm support of Agnes he might possibly have been ostracised, for a time at least.

It was with much less certainty that she spread before Bobby the facts and figures which Uncle Dan had secured about the condition and prospects of the Bulletin. She did not urge the project upon him. Instead, though in considerable anxiety, she left the proposition open to his own judgment. He pondered the question more soberly and seriously than he had yet considered anything. There were but two chances left to redeem himself now, and he felt much like a gambler who has been reduced to his last desperate stake. He grew almost haggard over the proposition, and he spent two solid weeks in investigation. He went to Washington to see Jack Starlett, who knew three or four newspaper proprietors in Philadelphia and elsewhere. He obtained introductions to these people and consulted with them, inspected their plants and listened to all they would say; as they liked him, they said much. Ripened considerably by what he had found out he came back home and bought the Bulletin. Moreover, he had very definitely made up his mind precisely what to do with it.

On the first morning that he walked into the office of that paper as its sole owner and proprietor, he called the managing editor to him and asked:

“What, heretofore, has been the politics of this paper?”

“Pale yellow jelly,” snapped Ben Jolter wrathfully.

“Supposed to be anti-Stone, hasn’t it been?” Bobby smilingly inquired.

“But always perfectly ladylike in what it said about him.”

“And what are the politics of the employees?”

At this Mr. Jolter snorted.

“They are good newspaper men, Mr. Burnit,” he stated in quick defense; “and a good newspaper man has no politics.”

Bobby eyed Mr. Jolter with contemplative favor. He was a stout, stockily-built man, with a square head and sparse gray hair that would persist in tangling and curling at the ends; and he perpetually kept his sleeves rolled up over his big arms.

“I don’t know anything about this business,” confessed Bobby, “but I hope to. First of all, I’d like to find out why the Bulletin has no circulation.”

“The lack of a spinal column,” asserted Jolter. “It has had no policy, stood pat on no proposition, and made no aggressive fight on anything.”

“If I understand what you mean by the word,” said Bobby slowly, “the Bulletin is going to have a policy.”

It was now Mr. Jolter’s turn to gaze contemplatively at Bobby.

“If you were ten years older I would feel more hopeful about it,” he decided bluntly.

The young man flushed uncomfortably. He was keenly aware that he had made an ass of himself in business four successive times, and that Jolter knew it. By way of facing the music, however, he showed to his managing editor a letter, left behind with old Johnson for Bobby by the late John Burnit:

The mere fact that a man has been foolish four times is no absolute proof that he is a fool; but it’s a mighty significant hint. However, Bobby, I’m still betting on you, for by this time you ought to have your fighting blood at the right temperature; and I’ve seen you play great polo in spite of a cracked rib.

“P. S. If any one else intimates that you are a fool, trounce him one for me.”

“If there’s anything in heredity you’re a lucky young man,” said Jolter seriously, as he handed back the letter.

“I think the governor was worried about it himself,” admitted Bobby with a smile; “and if he was doubtful I can’t blame you for being so. Nevertheless, Mr. Jolter, I must insist that we are going to have a policy,” and he quietly outlined it.

Mr. Jolter had been so long a directing voice in the newspaper business that he could not be startled by anything short of a presidential assassination, and that at press time. Nevertheless, at Bobby’s announcement he immediately sought for his pipe and was compelled to go into his own office after it. He came back lighting it and felt better.

“It’s suicide!” he declared.

“Then we’ll commit suicide,” said Bobby pleasantly.

Mr. Jolter, after long, grinning thought, solemnly shook hands with him.

“I’m for it,” said he. “Here’s hoping that we survive long enough to write our own obituary!”

Mr. Jolter, to whom fighting was as the breath of new-mown hay, and who had long been curbed in that delightful occupation, went back into his own office with a more cheerful air than he had worn for many a day, and issued a few forceful orders, winding up with a direction to the press foreman to prepare for ten thousand extra copies that evening.

When the three o’clock edition of the Bulletin came on the street, the entire first page was taken up by a life-size half-tone portrait of Sam Stone, and underneath it was the simple legend:

THIS MAN MUST LEAVE TOWN

The first citizens to awake to the fact that the Bulletin was born anew were the newsboys. Those live and enterprising merchants, with a very keen judgment of comparative values, had long since ceased to call the Bulletin at all; half of them had even ceased to carry it. Within two minutes after this edition was out they were clamoring for additional copies, and for the first time in years the alley door of the Bulletin was besieged by a seething mob of ragged, diminutive, howling masculinity. Out on the street, however, they were not even now calling the name of the paper. They were holding forth that black first page and screaming just the name of Sam Stone.

Sam Stone! It was a magic name, for Stone had been the boss of the town since years without number; a man who had never held office, but who dictated the filling of all offices; a man who was not ostensibly in any business, but who swayed the fortune of every public enterprise; a self-confessed grafter whom crusade after crusade had failed to dislodge from absolute power. The crowds upon the street snapped eagerly at that huge portrait and searched as eagerly through the paper for more about the Boss. They did not find it, except upon the editorial page, where, in the space usually devoted to drivel about “How Kind We Should Be to Dumb Animals,” and “Why Fathers Should Confide More in Their Sons,” appeared in black type a paraphrase of the legend on the outside: “Sam Stone Must Leave Town.” Beneath was the additional information: “Further issues of the Bulletin will tell why.” Above and below this was nothing but startlingly white blank paper, two solid columns of it up and down the page.

Down in the deep basement of the Bulletin, the big three-deck presses, two of which had been standing idle since the last presidential election, were pounding out copies by the thousand, while grimy pressmen, blackened with ink, perspired most happily.

By five o’clock, men and even girls, pouring from their offices, and laborers coming from work, had all heard of it, and on the street the bold defiance created first a gasp and then a smile. Another attempt to dislodge Sam Stone was, in the light of previous efforts, a laughable thing to contemplate; and yet it was interesting.

In the office of the Bulletin it was a gleeful occasion. Nonchalant reporters sat down with that amazing front page spread out before them, studied the brutal face of Stone and chuckled cynically. Lean Doc Miller, “assistant city editor,” or rather head copy reader, lit one cigarette from the stub of another and observed, to nobody in particular but to everybody in general:

“I can see where we all contribute for a beautiful Gates Ajar floral piece for one Robert Burnit;” whereupon fat “Bugs” Roach, “handling copy” across the table from him, inquired:

“Do you suppose the new boss really has this much nerve, or is he just a damned fool?”

“Stone won’t do a thing to him!” ingratiatingly observed a “cub” reporter, laying down twelve pages of “copy” about a man who had almost been burglarized.

“Look here, you Greenleaf Whittier Squiggs,” said Doc Miller most savagely, not because he had any particular grudge against the unfortunately named G. W., but because of discipline and the custom with “cubs,” “the next time you’re sent out on a twenty-minute assignment like this, remember the number of the Bulletin, 427 Grand Street. The telephone is Central 2051, and don’t forget to report the same day. Did you get the man’s name? Uh-huh. His address? Uh-huh. Well, we don’t want the item.”

Slow and phlegmatic Jim Brown, who had been city editor on the Bulletin almost since it was the Bulletin under half a dozen changes of ownership and nearly a score of managing editors, sauntered over into Jolter’s room with a copy of the paper in his hand, and a long black stogie held by some miracle in the corner of his mouth, where it would be quite out of the road of conversation.

“Pretty good stuff,” he drawled, indicating the remarkable first page.

“The greatest circus act that was ever pulled off in the newspaper business,” asserted Jolter. “It will quadruple the present circulation of the Bulletin in a week.”

“Make or break,” assented the city editor, “with the odds in favor of the break.”

A slenderly-built young man, whose red face needed a shave and whose clothes, though wrinkled and unbrushed, shrieked of quality, came stumbling up the stairs in such hot haste as was possible in his condition, and without ceremony or announcement burst into the room where Bobby Burnit, with that day’s issue of the Bulletin spread out before him, was trying earnestly to get a professional idea of the proper contents of a newspaper.

“Great goods, old man!” said the stranger. “I want to congratulate you on your lovely nerve,” and seizing Bobby’s hand he shook it violently.

“Thanks,” said Bobby, not quite sure whether to be amused or resentful. “Who are you?”

“I’m Dillingham,” announced the red-faced young man with a cheerful smile.

Bobby was about to insist upon further information, when Mr. Jolter came in to introduce Brown, who had not yet met Mr. Burnit.

“Dill,” drawled Brown, with a twinkle in his eye, “how much money have you?”

“Money to burn; money in every pocket,” asserted Mr. Dillingham; “money to last for ever,” and he jammed both hands in his trousers’ pockets.

It was an astonishing surprise to Mr. Dillingham, after groping in those pockets, to find that he brought up only a dollar bill in his left hand and forty-five cents in silver in his right. He was still contemplating in awed silence this perplexing fact when Brown handed him a five-dollar bill.

“Now, you run right out and get stewed to the eyebrows again,” directed Brown. “Get properly pickled and have it over with, then show up here in the morning with a headache and get to work. We want you to take charge of the Sam Stone exposé, and in to-morrow’s Bulletin we want the star introduction of your life.”

“Do you mean to say you’re going to trust the whole field conduct of this campaign to that chap?” asked Bobby, frowning, when Dillingham had gone.

“This is his third day, so Dill’s safe for to-morrow morning,” Brown hastened to assure him. “He’ll be up here early, so penitent that he’ll be incased in a blue fog – and he’ll certainly deliver the goods.”

Bobby sighed and gave it up. This was a new world.

Over in his dingy little office, up his dingy flight of stairs, Sam Stone sat at his bare and empty old desk, looking contemplatively out of the window, when Frank Sharpe – his luxuriant gray mustache in an extraordinary and most violent state of straggling curliness – came nervously bustling in with a copy of the Bulletin in his hand.

“Have you seen this?” he shrilled.

“Heard about it,” grunted Stone.

“But what do you think of it?” demanded Sharpe indignantly, and spread the paper out on the desk before the Boss, thumping it violently with his knuckles.

Stone studied it well, without the slightest change of expression upon his heavy features.

“It’s a swell likeness,” he quietly conceded, by and by.

CHAPTER XXIII
BOBBY BEGINS TO GIVE TESTIMONY THAT HE IS OLD JOHN BURNIT’S SON

Closeted with Jolter and Brown, and mapping out with them the dangerous campaign into which they had plunged, Bobby did not leave the office of the Bulletin until six o’clock. At the curb, just as he was about to step into his waiting machine, Biff Bates hailed him with vast enthusiasm.

“Go to it, Bobby!” said he. “I’m backing you across the board, win, place and show; but let me give you a hot tip right from the stables. You want to be afraid to go home in the dark, or Stone’s lobbygows will lean on you with a section of plumbing.”

“I’ve thought of that, Biff,” laughed Bobby; “and I think I’ll organize a band of murderers of my own.”

Johnson, whom Bobby had quite forgotten in the stress of the day, joined them at this moment. Thirty years as head bookkeeper and confidential adviser in old John Burnit’s merchandise establishment had not fitted lean Johnson for the less dignified and more flurried work of a newspaper office, even in the business department, and he was looking very much fagged.

“Well, Johnson, what do you think of my first issue of the Bulletin?” asked Bobby pleasantly.

Johnson looked genuinely distressed.

“To tell you the truth, Mr. Burnit,” said he, “I have not seen it. I never in all my life saw a place where there were so many interruptions to work. If we could only be back in your father’s store, sir.”

“We’ll be back there before we quit,” said Bobby confidently; “or I’ll be in the incurable ward.”

“I hope so, sir,” said Johnson dismally, and strode across the street to catch his car; but he came back hastily to add: “I meant about the store; not about the asylum.”

Biff Bates laughed as he clambered into the tonneau with Bobby.

“If you’d make a billion dollars, Bobby, but didn’t get back your father’s business that Silas Trimmer snaked away from you, Johnson would think you’d overlooked the one best bet.”

“So would I,” said Bobby soberly, and he had but very little more to say until the chauffeur stopped at Bobby’s own door, where puffy old Applerod, who had been next to Johnson in his usefulness to old John Burnit, stood nervously awaiting him on the steps.

“Terrible, sir! Terrible!” spluttered Applerod the moment he caught sight of Bobby. “This open defiance of Mr. Stone will put entirely out of existence what little there is left of the Brightlight Electric Company.”

“Cheer up, Applerod, for death must come to us all,” encouraged Bobby. “Such shreds and fragments of the Brightlight as there are left would have been wiped out anyhow; and frankly, if you must have it, I put you in there as general manager, when I shifted Johnson to the Bulletin this morning, because there was nothing to manage.”

Applerod threw up his hands in dismay.

“And there will be less. Oh, Mr. Burnit, if your father were only here!”

Bobby, whose suavity Applerod had never before seen ruffled, turned upon him angrily.

“I’m tired hearing about my father, Applerod,” he declared. “I revere the governor’s memory too much to want to be made angry by the mention of his name. Hereafter, kindly catch the idea, if you can, that I am my own man and must work out my own salvation; and I propose to do it! Biff, you don’t mind if I put off seeing you until to-morrow? I have a dinner engagement this evening and very little time to dress.”

“His own man,” said Applerod sorrowfully when Bobby had left them. “John Burnit would be half crazy if he could know what a botch his son is making of things. I don’t see how a man could let himself be cheated four times in business.”

“I can tell you,” retorted Biff. “All his old man ever did for him was to stuff his pockets with kale, and let him grow up into the sort of clubs where one sport says: ‘I’m going to walk down to the corner.’ Says the other sport: ‘I’ll bet you see more red-headed girls on the way down than you do on the way back.’ Says the first sport: ‘You’re on for a hundred.’ He goes down to the corner and he comes back. ‘How about the red-headed girls?’ asks the second sport. ‘I lose,’ says the first sport; ‘here’s your hundred.’ Now, when Bobby is left real money, he starts in to play the same open-face game, and when one of these business wolves tells him anything Bobby don’t stop to figure whether the mut means what he says, or means something else that sounds like the same thing. Now, if Bobby was a simp they’d sting him in so many places that he’d be swelled all over, like an exhibition cream puff; but he ain’t a simp. It took him four times to learn that he can’t take a man’s word in business. That’s all he needed. Bobby’s awake now, and more than that he’s mad, and if I hear you make another crack that he ain’t about all the candy I’ll sick old Johnson on you,” and with this dire threat Biff wheeled, leaving Mr. Applerod speechless with red-faced indignation.

It was just a quiet family dinner that Bobby attended that night at the Ellistons’, with Uncle Dan and Aunt Constance Elliston at the head and foot of the table, and across from him the smiling face of Agnes. He was so good to look at that Agnes was content just to watch him, but Aunt Constance noted his abstraction and chided him upon it.

“Really, Bobby,” said she, “since you have gone into business you’re ruined socially.”

“Frankly, I don’t mind,” he replied, smiling. “I’d rather be ruined socially than financially. In spite of certain disagreeable features of it, I have a feeling upon me to-night that I’m going to like the struggle.”

“You’re starting a stiff one now,” observed Uncle Dan dryly. “Beginning an open fight against Sam Stone is a good deal like being suspended over Hades by a single hair – amidst a shower of Roman candles.”

“That’s putting it about right, I guess,” admitted Bobby; “but I’m relying on the fact that the public at heart is decent.”

“Do you remember, Bobby, what Commodore Vanderbilt said about the public?” retorted Uncle Dan. “They’re decent, all right, but they won’t stick together in any aggressive movement short of gunpowder. In the meantime, Stone has more entrenchments than even you can dream. For instance, I should not wonder but that within a very short time I shall be forced to try my influence with you in his behalf.”

“How?” asked Bobby incredulously.

“Well, I am trying to get a spur track from the X. Y. Z. Railroad to my factory on Spindle Street. The X. Y. Z. is perfectly willing to put in the track, and I’m trying to have the city council grant us a permit. Now, who is the city council?”

“Stone,” Bobby was compelled to admit.

“Of course. I have already arranged to pay quite a sum of money to the capable and honest city councilman of that ward. The capable and honest councilman will go to Stone and give up about three-fourths of what I pay him. Then Stone will pass the word out to the other councilmen that he’s for Alderman Holdup’s spur track permit, and I get it. Very simple arrangement, and satisfactory, but, if they do not shove that measure through at their meeting to-morrow night, before Stone finds out any possible connection between you and me, the price of it will not be money. I’ll be sent to you.”

“I see,” said Bobby in dismay. “In other words, it will be put flatly up to me; I’ll either have to quit my attacks on Stone, or be directly responsible for your losing your valuable spur track.”

“Exactly,” said Uncle Dan.

Bobby drew a long breath.

“I’m very much afraid, Mr. Elliston, that you will have to do without your spur.”

Uncle Dan’s eyes twinkled.

“I’m willing,” said he. “I have a good offer to sell that branch of my plant anyhow, and I think I’ll dispose of it. I have been very frank with you about this, so that you will know exactly what to expect when other people come at you. You will be beset as you never were before.”

“I have been looking for an injunction, myself.”

“You will have no injunction, for Stone scarcely dares go publicly into his own courts,” said Uncle Dan, with a pretty thorough knowledge, gained through experience, of the methods of the “Stone gang”; “though he might even use that as a last resort. That will be after intimidation fails, for it is quite seriously probable that they will hire somebody to beat you into insensibility. If that don’t teach you the proper lesson, they will probably kill you.”

Agnes looked up apprehensively, but catching Bobby’s smile took this latter phase of the matter as a joke. Bobby himself was not deeply impressed with it, but before he went away that night Uncle Dan took him aside and urged upon him the seriousness of the matter.

“I’ll fight them with their own weapons, then,” declared Bobby. “I’ll organize a counter band of thugs, and I’ll block every move they make with one of the same sort. Somehow or other I think I am going to win.”

“Of course you will win,” said Agnes confidently, overhearing this last phrase; and with that most prized of all encouragement, the faith in his prowess of the one woman, Bobby, for that night at least, felt quite contemptuous of the grilling fight to come.

His second issue of the Bulletin contained on the front page a three-column picture of Sam Stone, with the same caption, together with a full-page article, written by Dillingham from data secured by himself and the others who were put upon the “story.” This set forth the main iniquities of Sam Stone and his crew of municipal grafters. In the third day’s issue the picture was reduced to two columns, occupying the left-hand upper corner of the front page, where Bobby ordered it to remain permanently as the slogan of the Bulletin; and now Dillingham began his long series of articles, taking up point by point the ramifications of Stone’s machine, and coming closer and closer daily to people who would much rather have been left entirely out of the picture.

It was upon this third day that Bobby, becoming apprehensive merely because nothing had happened, received a visit from Frank Sharpe. Mr. Sharpe was as nattily dressed as ever, and presented himself as pleasantly as a summer breeze across fields of clover.

“I came in to see you about merging the Brightlight Electric Company with the Consolidated, Mr. Burnit,” said Mr. Sharpe in a chatty tone, laying his hat, cane and gloves upon Bobby’s desk and seating himself comfortably.

From his face there was no doubt in Mr. Sharpe’s mind that this was a mere matter of an interview with a satisfactory termination, for Mr. Sharpe had done business with Bobby before; but something had happened to Bobby in the meantime.

“When I get ready for a merger of the Brightlight with the Consolidated I’ll tell you about it; and also I’ll tell you the terms,” Bobby advised him with a snap, and for the first time Mr. Sharpe noted what a good jaw Bobby had.

“I should think,” hesitated Sharpe, “that in the present condition of the Brightlight almost any terms would be attractive to you. You have no private consumers now, and your contract for city lighting, which you can not evade except by bankruptcy, is losing you money.”

“If that were news to me it would be quite startling,” responded Bobby, “but you see, Mr. Sharpe, I am quite well acquainted with the facts myself. Also, I have a strong suspicion that you tampered with my plant; that your hired agents cut my wires, ruined my dynamos and destroyed the efficiency of my service generally.”

“You will find it very difficult to prove that, Mr. Burnit,” said Sharpe, with a sternness which could not quite conceal a lurking smile.

“I’m beginning to like difficulty,” retorted Bobby. “I do not mind telling you that I was never angry before in my life, and I’m surprised to find myself enjoying the sensation.”

Bobby was still more astonished to find himself laying his fist tensely upon his desk. The lurking smile was now gone entirely from Mr. Sharpe’s face.

“I must admit, Mr. Burnit, that your affairs have turned out rather unfortunately,” he said, “but I think that they might be remedied for you a bit, perhaps. Suppose you go and see Stone.”

“I do not care to see Mr. Stone,” said Bobby.

“But he wants to see you,” persisted Sharpe. “In fact, he told me so this morning. I’m quite sure you would find it to your advantage to drop over there.”

“I shall never enter Mr. Stone’s office until he has vacated it for good,” said Bobby; “then I might be induced to come over and break up the furniture. If Stone wants to see me I’m keeping fairly regular office hours here.”