In a little while there would be only himself to make decisions, to take action, to bear a responsibility for matters which no longer involved merely himself or his immediate family but embraced people he had never seen, would never know. Their welfare, resting in his hands, burdened him with an oppressive weight. Why should he shoulder this burden. He began to understand why men here and there evade responsibility, or break down under it, when the shadow of such responsibility loomed darkly over himself. He had had no preparation for responsibility. He had lived--he smiled at the platitude--a sheltered life. Except in one or two isolated instances, such as his marriage, he had never been compelled to make a momentous decision. His youth, with its romantic dreaming, its fastidiousness which had made him shun such physical grossness as Grove's, had been ordered and directed. So had his more formal education. Even his four years in the army, except in unimportant details, had never taken him into the realm of plan and execution. He had simply been a cog in the military machine, obeying orders, reissuing those orders to men bound to obey him, as he was himself bound to obey others. Responsibility rested always in other hands. He had been aware of that and fairly content to have it so. But that was at an end. Very soon now, a matter of hours, when the unconscious old man in a room down the hallway breathed out his tired life he, Rod Norquay, would become the fulcrum and lever which should move enormous weights. He would be faced by a necessity to take up a task which offered little hope of reward save a sense of duty performed. Other men's welfare, other men's money, other men's sins. He could draw back from this, or see it through. He could evade it or grapple it stoutly. But there it was, waiting for him to decide. Grove had evaded, when he faced the incontrovertible result of his handiwork. Or had he? No one would ever know. He had gone in mid-afternoon from the Norquay Trust office to his home. He had telephoned a friend to join him in a duck hunt at a gun club on the Ladner flats, had arranged to pick up his friend. He had come out from the house to the garage, bearing a shotgun, a bag and a shooting coat, whistling as he came. He spoke to the chauffeur genially. While the man attended to some detail of his machine the shotgun cracked and Grove Norquay fell against the running-board. He was dead before the man could cry for help. And whether it was sheer accident, or whether he had killed himself in a moment of despair at the muddle he had wrought, Rod could not say. Publicly it went as a sad accident. But he knew what his father thought. He knew, too, what rumors ran like sly foxes in the street, rumors which did not have their origin in mere conjecture, but which nevertheless would have brought Grove's financial castle tumbling about their ears if his father had not been prepared.