“I was wrong,” said his father, humbly. “I have put you off the track by using the word imagination. It has no place here. I speak to you of fact.” Trenn got up with the brisk air of one who remembers he has business to transact, then pausing for a moment with an eye flown already to find his hat, “I might,” he said obligingly, “I might try to get up there some vacation, and have a look round.” He “might.” He might _try_. During some idle interval in the real business of life. Once on the spot he would condescend to “look round.” Even his own son could not take the thing seriously. Well, it began to look as if, after all, they might be right—his wife, Charlie and Harrington Trennor, Elihu Cox, and now Trenn. Mar, the man who believed he had a gold mine in the arctic regions, was a sort of harmless monomaniac. Sitting there in a sudden darkness that was dashed with self-derision (much was clear in those scorching flashes), Nathaniel Mar met the grim moment when to his own mind he first admitted doubt. Groping by and by for comfort, he touched the heart of sorrow with “Nothing like this can ever happen to me again.” It was true. In that hour something precious went out of his life. No one, not even Trenn, had any idea what had happened. But every one saw that Nathaniel Mar was changed. * * * * * Trenn went to work on Karl Siegel’s ranch, and Harry presently announced that he meant to join him. No, he wasn’t going to finish at the High School. Trenn had an opportunity to go in with Siegel on a new deal, and Harry could be made use of, too, if he came _now_. Such an opportunity might never repeat itself. Mrs. Mar was of the same opinion as the boys, and Harry was in towering good spirits. His father wondered dully. Ought he not give his younger son the same chance he’d given the elder, even if, like Trenn, Harry should fail utterly to see how great it was? Mar shrank from a second ordeal, and yet he knew that, vaguely enough, he had been depending on Harry’s helping him to bear Trenn’s indifference and unbelief. Had he not for a year now, in any lighter hour, invariably said to himself: “After all, I have two boys. Perhaps Harry will be the one”—yes, he must tell Harry, or the boy might reproach him in time to come. Trenn’s letter had arrived in the morning. All day Mar revolved in his head how he would present this other “opening” so that Harry— In the end he resolved to take the papers out of the safe, and simply turn them over to his son, as though the father were no longer there to give the story tongue. Mar took the precious packet home with him the same afternoon. Harry was out. That evening he was late for supper, and he came in full of the outfit he’d been buying. “Buying an outfit already!” his father exclaimed. “Of course! _I_ don’t mean to let the grass grow—” “Nor Trenn, apparently. I hadn’t heard that he was financing you.” “He isn’t. I had a little saved up, and mother gave me the rest.”