"Zaidee, my little Zaidee," he said, and, lifting her on his knee, strained her tightly to him with a rush of such passionate affection that it almost unmanned him for the moment. She lay against his heart perfectly still. After a few moments she put her small hand to his lips, and he kissed it, and she smiled up at him, warm and secure--his little darling girl, his little princess. Yet, even in that joy of his child, he felt a new heart-hunger which no child love, beautiful as it was, could ever satisfy, any more than it could satisfy the heart-hunger of his wife. She had begun, since the ball, to go around again as usual, and the house looked as if it had a mistress in it once more, though the atmosphere of a home was lacking. She was languid, irritable, and unsmiling, accepting his occasional caresses as if they made little difference to her, though sometimes she showed a sort of fierce, passionate remorse and longing. Either mood was unpleasing to him: it contained tacit reproach for his separateness. Then, there were still occasionally evenings when he came home to find her windows darkened and everything in the household upset and forlorn; when every footfall must be adjusted to her ear--that ear that had strained and ached for his coming. Her whole day culminated in that poor, meager half-hour in which he sat by her, and in which her personality hardly reached him until he kissed her, on leaving, with a quick, remorseful affection at being so glad to go. The typometer disaster had proved as bad as, and worse than, he had feared, but he was working retrieval with splendid effort, calling all his personal magnetism into play where it was possible. He had borrowed a large sum from Lanston's,--a young private banking firm, glad at the moment to lend at a fairly large interest for a term of months,--holding on to the dissatisfied customers and creating new demand for the machine, so that the sales forged ahead of Cater's, with whom there was still a good-natured we-rise-together sort of rivalry, though it seemed at times as if it might take a sharper edge. Leverich's dictum regarding Cater embodied an extension of the policy to be pursued with minor, outlying competitors: "You'll have to force that fellow out of business or get him to come into the combine." Leverich again smiled on Justin. Immediate success was the price demanded for the continuance of a backing. There was just a little of the high-handed quality in his manner which says, "No more nonsense, if you please." That morning after the ball had shown Justin the fangs that were ready, if he showed symptoms of "falling down," to shake him ratlike by the neck and cast him out. "Papa dear, papa dear! There's a man coming up the walk, my papa dear."