It was eleven o’clock of an August morning, and London was as hot as Rome. The energy had gone out of things; the streets were curiously silent; many of the offices deserted. Mr Abbott sat sweltering in a shirt and white breeches, which he had preserved from some Eastern travel. He thought it his business to be there, and there he was; but no work could he or any other man do on such a day. Cosmo, rigidly dressed, and with an extreme neatness, cool in the tropical weather, everything about him ordered, came in with a brief recognition. In the few months of his training, he had advanced years in the knowledge of conduct and of business, and was already manifesting the material of which the great successes are made. To almost any other man in London, he would have used the delicate art which a great scheme demands; but he knew his man too well to attempt any such art with Mr Abbott. Here and there, you will discover, even in the modern world, the man that must be driven. You will not always succeed in driving him; but there is only one method of approaching the business. There was exact determination and aim in every gesture of the young man: his vigour and directness were the more remarkable, in that until this moment he had never used such an attitude—save possibly to servants. He sat down in a chair just opposite his father’s friend. He put down his hat upon the table with a slight, hard rap; looked Mr Abbott steadily and strongly in the eyes (an effort so unusual as to cause him positive pain), and said: “I think you know why I have come.” To such gross simplicity as the shipmaster’s, all this was as yet nothing but an annoyance. He took the young man’s hat off the table, reached out so as to hang it on the gas bracket behind him (whence it fell to the floor) and said “No.” And, as he said it, a very unpleasing expression passed across his face. Cosmo jumped up, picked his hat off the floor, brushed it with his arm, rapped it down upon the table again and said, with admirable self-restraint: “You know as well as I do why I have come.” “Let me put it up safely for you,” said Mr Abbott, and he reached forward again for the hat. Cosmo withdrew it and held it in his right hand, and, even at that most incongruous moment, Mr Abbott could not refrain from laughter. “You will have it,” he said; and his amusement so far got the better of his temper, that Cosmo thought for one moment inwardly whether it would not be better to approach this coarse mind by another channel. But his training wisely persuaded him that the most direct of methods was the best. The method whereby men tame beasts; the masterly method of fear. “I have come,” he said, still keeping himself well in hand, “because matters cannot go on much longer as they are doing now.” He paused a moment to let the impression form. “It can’t go on, Mr Abbott, and I have come to tell you so quite frankly.... Before I leave this room I mean the business to be settled.... It can’t go on.”