Macclesfield smoothed his face thoughtfully. “I don't deny a certain amount of surprise. You have discussed the subject very ably. I'd rather you'd let me have that in the form of a report.” “All right.” “And you'll add a preliminary estimate on the bridge? I--don't, in fact, withdraw it.” He rose and shook hands with Hennion. “So you think the sentiment wasn't sincere? Well, I don't know. I sometimes have them.” “Tait,” he said, as they went down the stairs. “That young man--for God's sake don't let's have any trouble with him.” “Is he going to bite or build?” “Build! Bless my soul, I hope so! A young man--a--that won't lose his temper! He didn't turn a hair! Bless my soul, Tait, I hope so!” Hennion was left to swing in his chair, to whistle and consider, to wonder what, in fact, might be the true sentiments of William R. Macclesfield, who had retreated neatly, to say the least. A slippery man, a little fishy, who slid around in a situation as if it were water. Perhaps that was injustice. Whether it were sincerity, or neatness, he had left Hennion with a sense of having done him an injustice. He turned to his desk and figured and wrote for half an hour; then pushed aside the papers and went out. He thought he would go over to East Argent and see how Kennedy was getting on with the grading. Before he had gone far he changed his mind. The grading job was not interesting. Kennedy could look after it. It might be better to let him work alone for a day or two, without watching; it would cheer up Kennedy not to feel eternally disgraced for blundering with his sand layer, or to feel that he had to go around acting like a desolate orphan about it. He took a car down Lower Bank Street, past the boathouses, and there paced the high wet and weedy river bank. Then he turned west through some miles of empty acres. Low marshy lands lay on his right, misty and warm in the distance, vividly green nearby. Now and again he crossed a street that had been thrust out speculatively from the vague verge of the city to tempt inhabitants. Cheap new houses were strung along them at wide intervals. The Gas Works had huge furnaces and a cluster of built-up streets about them. He followed the line of the Boulevard surveys, absorbed, often stopping and making notes. He came through a stretch of cornfield and pasture. If the city bought it in here before it began to develop the section, it would be shrewd investment. The marshes would be crossed by an embankment. A half mile further on he vaulted over a high fence and plunged into the wet woods and open spaces, scrubby and weedy, of Wabash Park, a stretch of three hundred acres and more, bought spasmodically by the city some years back and then left to its own devices. It was useful now mainly to small boys, who speared frogs in the broad, sluggish creek that twisted through between banks of slippery clay.