Up-stairs, Hildegarde was listening, listening not to what was being said down-stairs, but to another conversation she had overheard months ago, the conversation between her father and a man she had never been able to identify. She was trying to hear his voice now, trying to bring the sound of it back into her ears so that she could listen to it and compare it with Cantor's familiar voice. CHAPTER XIII The summer and early autumn months of the year 1916 were, perhaps, the least illumined of any period of Potter Waite's life. It was a period of drudgery without encouragement, of restless, brooding moods, of kicking against the pricks. There were hours when he felt himself and his work to be futile, when there was imminence of his return to the old life of the bar, the cabaret, the club. With the countenance and belief of one person he could have surmounted it all easily; but neither countenance nor belief was to be had of Hildegarde von Essen. If possible, she was farther from him than ever. If there were one element of brightness, it was his realization of a change that was taking place in his father. Potter watched it with hope, saw the gradual movement of it, and read in it a token that other men of power throughout the nation might be changing as Fabius Waite was changing. Fabius Waite was beginning to think about the United States. It required a blow touching his own person to jar Fabius from his foundations of Middle-Western security and conservatism, but he was too big a man, too able, too sound at the heart to continue to let the personal consideration sway him. He was a man to be depended on to view affairs in their larger aspects, and to weigh them, not with respect to their bearing upon himself and his concerns, but upon the nation in which he had risen to the summit of prosperity. The fire in his plant, of demonstrated incendiary origin, gave him the initial impetus. Potter could almost find it in his heart to rejoice at that temporary disaster. Though the criminals were not apprehended nor identified, Fabius Waite, correctly enough, laid the fire at the door of German plotters, and he expressed himself with less moderation than was his custom. "It's an infernal, sneaking business," he said to Potter, "and a government which not only sanctions, but deliberately buys and pays for, such outrages is not a civilized government. Germany has thrown its decency into the sea." "But," said Potter, to egg his father on, "it's war. Your trucks were going to fight against Germany. Hadn't she a right to destroy them?" "Yes, openly, with cannon, or in a belligerent country. We are not belligerent. We're serving all the world alike. If they have the idea America will stand for this sort of thing--" "It makes a lot of difference, father," said Potter, a trifle impertinently, "whose dog gets kicked." "Eh?"