To the eyes that read these words they were written in letters of fire. They seemed to burn themselves in Helen’s brain. Could this terrible indictment be true? Was it justified? At least it was the considered verdict of the man she had promised to marry. And it was directed against one who had her whole allegiance, one who crowned with a princely reward her loyal labors. The Chief had many foes. So much was known to her. But like most other people she had been willing to regard that fact as a tribute to the peculiar nature of his talent. Saul Hartz’s enemies were the first to own that his genius had enabled him to get so many strings into his hand that he was able to interfere too intimately with the inner workings of the body politic. He had made such a “corner” in public opinion and the subterranean forces which mold it that he had been able to upset the true balance of government throughout the world. Acute minds saw the time coming when the U. P. would have all nations at its mercy. Helen Sholto knew that sinister charges had been brought against a portentous machine. But to her they had always remained vague. Now, however, they were taking shape. Once she had heard Mr. Hartz stigmatize John Endor as a fanatic. The moment was at hand when the two men must be weighed in the scales. Which was in the right? Helen felt that her whole career was involved in the answer about to be given. Under which king, Bezonian? The words seemed to come to her out of the upper air. It was as if they sounded in the delicate ear of her spirit. Before, however, she could trace them to their source she was terribly startled. Someone had entered the room unperceived. With a shiver she woke to a perception of the fact that the Colossus stood looking at her. VIII There was something almost feline in the movements of Saul Hartz. So cat-footed was his progress about the Office that he was continually taking his staff by surprise. It made for efficiency, no doubt, this liability to be overlooked and incidentally “to be fired” at short notice; but in the opinion of the more Olympian spirits who lived under his ægis such tactics were hardly worthy of one so august. They were content to suffer them all the same. Saul Hartz in everything insisted on being a law unto himself. He was very much a law unto himself to-night. “What do you make of it?” So like the man to get through at once, without preface or apology, to a leading question. The book, at that moment, was the one thing that mattered to the Colossus. “Bright fellow that?” He did not disdain to answer his own question; it was his method, as a rule, of asking another. “But!” He tapped a finger of rue, half humorous, half melodramatic upon the center of an immense forehead, “just a weeny!” As he drummed again an odd puckering of the eyelids somehow became truly comic. “I’m sorry to have to say so.”