Then he turned toward the City to visit his temporal kingdom. There in the great Corn Exchange Building his domain was unquestioned. There in the room with the mahogany walls he could feel his power, and stanch the flow of his courage. There he was a man. But alas for human vanity! When he got to the City, he found the morning papers full of a story of a baby that had died from overeating breakfast food made at his mills and adulterated with earth from his Missouri clay banks, as the coroner had attested after an autopsy; and a miserable county prosecutor was looking for John Barclay. So he hid all the next day in his offices, and that evening took Neal Ward on a special train in his private car, on a roundabout way home to Sycamore Ridge. It was a wretched homecoming for so great and successful a man as Barclay. Yet he with all his riches, with all his material power, even he longed for the safety of home, as any hunted thing longs for his lair. On the way he paced the diagonals of the little office room in his car, like a caged jackal. The man had lost his anchor; the things which his life had been built on would not hold him. Money--men envied the rich nowadays, he said, and the rich man had no rights in the courts or out of them; friends--they had gone up in the market, and he could not afford them; politics--he had found it a quicksand. So he jabbered to Neal Ward, his secretary, and pulled down the curtains of his car on the station side of every stop the train made in its long day's journey. CHAPTER XXIV It was nearly midnight when the special train pulled into Sycamore Ridge, and Neal Ward hurried home. He went to his room, and found there a letter and a package, both addressed in Jeanette's handwriting. The letter was only a note that read:-- "MY DEAREST BOY: I could not wait to send it for your Christmas present. So I am sending it the very day it is finished. I hope it will bring me close to you--into your very heart and keep me there. I have kissed it--for I knew that you would. "Your loving JEANETTE." He tore open the package and found a miniature of Jeanette done on ivory--that seemed to bring her into the room, and illumine it with her presence. The thing bloomed with life, and his heart bounded with joy as his eyes drank the beauty of it. His father called from below stairs, and the youth went down holding the note and the miniature in his hands. Before the father could speak, the son held out the picture, and Philemon Ward looked for a moment into the glowing faces--that of the picture and that of the living soul before him, and hesitated before speaking. "I got your wire--" he began. "But isn't it beautiful, father--wonderful!" broke in the son.