What an intensely respectable gentleman, what severely respectable views, what strict morality, what an estimable father of a family! Ah, but draw the curtain of years aside, and we behold another man--another man, yet still the same: a man about town, philandering, deceiving, lying, and playing the base part to serve his selfish pleasures. Where is the morality, where the respectability now?--and which of the two is the true man? Was this the case with Mr. Poynter? The course of events may possibly supply the answer to this question presently. Meanwhile nothing is more certain to-day than that he is accepted as he presents himself. But if in the past life of such a man as Aaron Cohen may be found an episode of his own creating upon which he looks with dismay, why might it not be so with such a man as Mr. Poynter? Aaron Cohen and he had been acquainted for many years, and at Aaron's hands Mr. Poynter had received mortifications again and again. In a country like England, where operations of magnitude are being continually undertaken, there is room for all who occupy the higher rungs of the ladder; it is only the lower rungs which are overcrowded, and which need clearing by means of emigration to lands where there is room for the toiling, suffering millions. But Mr. Poynter chose to believe that there was not room for Aaron and himself, and he had nursed and fostered an ardent wish to drag Aaron down. Perhaps it was the knowledge of his own early life that made him think, "If I could find something in his past that would bring shame upon him--if I could only rake up something that would show him in his true light! It would be the commercial and social ruin of him. He would never be able to hold up his head again." He would gladly have paid for some such discovery. At the present time he had special reasons for hate. One reason was that the strike in the building trade was affecting him seriously. He was engaged in large contracts in the carrying out of which some thousands of men were needed, and it was chiefly against himself that the strike was ordered by the unions. He was on the brink of great losses, and Aaron had been called in as a mediator and arbitrator. The strike at an end he was safe, but every day that it was prolonged meant so many hundreds of pounds out of his pocket. His fate seemed to hang upon the final advice to the men which Aaron was to give, and his profits would be large or small according to the nature of that advice. He laid the credit of the strike at Aaron's door, for in their enterprises he and Aaron employed different methods. Aaron had pursued in England the course he had pursued in France. He paid his men liberally, gave them bonuses, even to a certain extent acknowledged them as co-operators. In Mr. Poynter's eyes this was a crime, for it struck at the very root of his prosperity. "He is a socialist," Mr. Poynter said; "men of his stamp are a danger to society."