Fessenden walked slowly towards the rift in the great wall of rock which marked the land entrance to the fjord. _Pocahontas_ was dancing just beyond that narrow gate, but although his fingers tingled for her sail, his step still halted; he knew that she would bring him swiftly within range of the keen thumping of a typewriter, possibly of more than one. He was dutifully and even deeply interested in his father’s vast affairs, and there were nights when he went to bed with the sensation that the Earth was his pillow; there were days when he dared to hope the time would come when he could with pleasure embroider the scenery with figures and puncture the silences of Nature with a typewriter. But the time was not yet. Four days since he had awakened his father at three in the morning, informed him that he was off for a solitary tramp into Norway, and promised to return at the end of a week. Conscience was driving him home sooner than he had intended, for he had revelled in the stillness and solitude of his wild and lonely tramp. He missed at first the friendliness of the Adirondacks, the only other mountains he knew; but the harsh and terrible grandeur about him companioned his mood--finally inspired him with a passionate sense of gratitude. For he was in a desperate state of rebellion. The philosophy he had invoked on the heels of Mr. Abbott’s revelation had but deferred the inevitable moment. He did not doubt that the future presented to him by his father would bring him power, but that future was--he sincerely hoped--far distant, and at present he was little more than a glorified clerk in training. His inheritance and his education permitted him to grasp the stupendous details with a sufficient facility, and there were moments when he was staggered and overwhelmed with the thought of such world-manipulating power, at others intoxicated with dreams of a future when himself should be a ruler of many times the strength of any monarch in Europe. In such moments he felt arrogant, and contemptuous of sovereigns who were but the tools of a people or a cabinet, no matter what the euphemisms, longed for the time to come when he could demonstrate to them the absolutism of concentrated capital in the hands of an uncrowned ruler of a great republic. But reaction under the lonely stars invariably chastened him. What did he amount to now? Who would recognize in him more than his famous father’s second? He was bursting with energy, with ambition for himself and the United States, and, in spite of his father’s love and sincere indulgence, he felt like a prisoner on parole. It is true that when he had confided his cherished ideal, the great and beneficent conception which was to have worked his fingers to the bone and made him old in his youth, Mr. Abbott had waved his golden wand. A Western desert hummed and echoed, and even now a huge building was rising on its foundations, and the first of the world’s electricians, for a