When Mr Burden awoke next morning, the deep sleep of fatigue and the good light of a new day had somewhat changed his mood. There remained of it nothing but an undercurrent of anxiety, which the conversation of Cosmo that morning did very much to allay. The day’s business at the office was prosperous, the air bracing and sunny; if he found himself walking towards Mr Abbott’s office that evening for the first time in so many weeks, it was only because he was a business man, trained to method, and that therefore he detested to abandon any resolve he had formed. He came severely, and with a purpose, into the little panelled room which had seen for 123 years the growth of the Abbott Line. The place reeked of our past; but there was that in it which has justly provided the financial press with a pet subject for ridicule. It was as small as the cabin of a ship; indeed it had sheltered three generations of men who had sailed as owners perpetually in their own craft. It suggested the punch and the tobacco of that lazy race of seamen, who knew of nothing but England, and cared for nothing but her; and yet—in a way—we love them. It suggested very primitive methods of business: phrases about “The position of the house,” the plodding and the short-sightedness of the men whose theories in government and finance we have, please God, finally abandoned. And at the old large desk, in this old small room, sat a figure most worthy of its frame. Mr Abbot was in everything one of the characters which, pleasing as they may still be in fiction to-day, would be sand in the bearings of England, ruining the machine, were they to reappear in our modern life. There was nothing in him of what a true citizen has under the stress and vision of our time. He was tall, stout, and rubicund; his voice, which was louder than that of a gentleman should be, pushed “cheeriness” up to and beyond the bounds of vulgarity. The obstinacy which his features partly betrayed was immediately apparent when he began to discuss any controversial matter. He was cocksure of this and of that, upon twenty subjects where men of an analytical power infinitely superior had, in the vast intellectual expansion of these latter years, been content to doubt or to criticise. He was, in a word, what he would have called “sound.” He was “sound” upon Free Trade; he was “sound” upon the maintenance of the gold standard—a matter upon which he could know absolutely nothing. He was “sound” in his contempt for “foreigners”—in which category he was pleased to include what he denominated “Yankees.” He loved England—but what he loved was the soil, the air, the habit; not that great vision we possess. He clipped his words in a manner so heartily unconscious and offensive that, for all his great wealth, the entry into a rank above that of his birth would have been denied him. He did not attempt it. [Illustration: “COMPETITION! SIR; COMPETITION!”]