To Saul Hartz, however, this message implied a great deal. It was his boast, and no idle one, that he was the best informed man in Europe. The wonderful organization of which he was the mainspring, the controlling spirit, gave him facilities for knowing what was taking place behind the scenes, not in England nor in Europe only, but in every land of the habitable globe. Many portentous and significant things, the aftermath of the recent world upheaval, which were only hinted at in senates and chancellories or vaguely guessed at by private individuals and the public at large were matters of common form to Saul Hartz. No man alive had a deeper insight into hidden things. And for that reason the shock he now received would hardly have been felt by a person of average information or experience. This message, strange as it was, came as a blow he had half foreseen. He was not unprepared, yet in spite of himself he felt a little stunned by it. The instinct of the dominant human male was to affect a high contempt, but the instinct of a mind acquainted with a thousand-and-one cross currents immediately below the troubled surface of human society was very different. As he stood at his writing table, holding the letter in his hand, a chill seemed to strike at his heart. He was still in this attitude when Robert Norton, one of the principal leader writers of the _Planet_, came into the room. Norton, a brilliant Irishman of thirty, was the master of a diabolically incisive but absolutely unscrupulous pen. Without convictions of his own, without faith, religion or a sense of justice, at every fresh cast of the political horoscope he was ready at a moment’s notice to make the worse appear the better part in entire subordination to the abnormal mind by whom he was rewarded with the salary of a prime minister. “Ha, Norton, good-morning!” It was a wrench for the Colossus to break his reverie, but with an effort he managed to do so. Norton, typical product of the large public school and the old university, bowed slightly. He was able to hide the urbane irony of his race, and that was all. With the air of a man at some pains to conceal the fact that his tongue is in his cheek he waited for the august Chief of the U. P. to speak again. “Are you up in this Garland business?” It was second nature with Saul Hartz to weigh his words. He took pains to adjust them to every fresh mind with whom he was brought in contact. In his daily intercourse with all sorts and conditions of people he prided himself upon the faculty of saying neither too little nor too much. “One only knows,” Norton answered, “that about twelve o’clock last night he fell down dead as he entered the Cosmopolitan.” “No more than that?” The careless tone, the veiled eyes took all significance out of the question.