"But he was stiff with 'em in the strike, though," the lawyer put in, a smile wrinkling his thin, pallid lips. "He fired every one who went out with the union,--never'd let 'em back, no matter what they said or did. Those there to-day were mostly the old ones that didn't strike." The two older men began to exchange stories about the dead man, of things they had seen while they were working for him,--his tricks of temper, whims of mind. Hollister spoke gently, almost tenderly, of the one he had worked with, as of one whose faults were flaws in a great stone. The lawyer spoke literally, impassively, as of some phenomenon of nature which he had seen often and had thoroughly observed. Young Hart lit another cigarette, and as he listened to the stories he thought of the girl's face just as he had seen it that day, utterly moved and transfixed with a strange emotion of tender sorrow that was half happiness. The expression puzzled him, and he ended by saying to himself that she was religious, meaning by that word that she was moved by certain feelings other than those which affected him or Everett or his mother even. And this new thought of her made her more precious in his eyes. He looked for her when they reached the sombre old house on Ohio Street, but she had already gone home. As Hollister was leaving the house, he said to the young man:-- "Can you come over to Wheeler's office to-morrow about four? Judge Phillips will be there, the other executor. We are to open the will. They have suggested that I ask you to join us," he added hastily, with an effort to be matter of fact. "All right, Hollister," the young man answered, with an equal effort to appear unconcerned. "I'll be over!" But his heart thumped strangely. CHAPTER II "Get all ready before you start," Powers Jackson had said, when his nephew, after four years at Cornell and three years at a famous technical school in the East, had suggested the propriety of finishing his professional training in architecture by additional study in Paris. "Get all ready,--then let us have results." He had taken his time to get ready. He had chosen to go to Cornell in the first place rather than to a larger university, because some of the boys of his high school class were going there. With us in America such matters are often settled in this childish way. The reason why he chose the profession of architecture was, apparently, scarcely less frivolous. A "fraternity brother" at Cornell, just home from Paris, fired the college boy's imagination for "the Quarter." But, once started in the course of architecture at the technical school, he found that he had stumbled into something which really interested him. For the first time in his life he worked seriously.