To all this, to this concrete, visible, tangible fortune, Potter Waite was sole heir. It was not like wealth in stocks, bonds, securities. It was not in promises to pay, in paper standing for something more substantial. It was _there_. It could be beheld in the mass. Perhaps a hundred millions of dollars actually reared themselves in brick and steel, in splendid, efficient machinery. Potter had grown up with it, was accustomed to it. Unlike the casual passer-by, he was not awed by it. He leaped from his car and ran up the broad flight of stairs leading to the offices on the second floor. "Dad in?" he flung at the man who sat behind the information-desk. "Yes, but he's occupied, Mr. Waite. I shouldn't go in." Potter strode past. The man rose as though to call him back, and then sat down with a shrug. Potter flung open the door of his father's office, flung himself through it. "Dad, have you heard?" he said, abruptly. Fabius Waite looked up, frowned. "I'm busy. Weren't you told?" he said. Potter glanced at the other occupants of the room; recognized Senator Marvel, did not recognize the other. He nodded to the Senator. "The Germans have torpedoed the _Lusitania_," he said. "It was without warning. More than a hundred Americans drowned--women and children ... like rats," he finished. The Senator was on his feet. The news had been a sudden, bewildering blow to him. "What's that? Are you sure? Where did you get it?" Potter threw a paper on the desk over which the Senator and the stranger crouched with manifest excitement. Not so Fabius Waite. He did not glance at the paper, nor did he seem moved. His broad, clean-shaven, patrician face showed no emotion except, perhaps, a shade of irritation at the others' reception of the tidings. Potter said to himself that his father would sit outwardly unmoved, unruffled, not in the least disarranged mentally, if word were brought him that the dissolution of the universe had commenced. It was true. Fabius Waite would study the information and determine his course of action before he gave a sign that the most sharp-eyed might read. "My God!" exclaimed the man whom Potter did not know. "What'll it mean?... What will it mean?" the Senator asked, in an awed, frightened voice. "What can it mean but war?" Potter said. His father merely glanced at him, not contemptuously, not rebukingly, in fact, not as if Potter were a human being at all, but as if he were some piece of the room's furniture to which attention had been called.