He stood on the deck looking back. The _Haida_ had not yet cleared the inner harbor. East and west the water front spread away for miles in a darkness thickened by the city smoke, a black pall jeweled with deck lights, emerald specks, ruby gleams, dots and squares of yellow, brilliant lines of arc lights, scintillating, imprisoned lightning. Behind that line of dusky wharves, where vessels from far ports disgorged their freight with groaning cargo winches, rose the banked and terraced lights of the town. Great electric signs blazed on warehouse roofs, on every vantage point, proclaiming to all and sundry that "Smith's Coffee," "Brown's Tobacco," "The House of Jones," "Your Credit is Good," were epochal affairs, worthy to be written in letters of fire against the sky. But from that flaming galaxy one--that, like the name of Abou ben Adhem, had been above all the rest--was missing now. It had greeted the incoming mariner and the tired commuter on the grunting ferries for twelve years. It would never glow again. The Norquay Trust Company was no more. It was as dead as the man whose futile ambition had given it birth. Its great seal would never again be affixed to any document. With a deep personal satisfaction Rod had wiped out its corporate existence. Legally, honorably, painlessly, he had put it to death. He stared over the rail. The hive! He seemed to hear the drone of countless creatures armed with invisible stings which they plied upon each other vindictively, unthinkingly, often without knowing what they did, as they buzzed about their sustenance-seeking, marching antlike in the streets, dumb swarms driven by instinct. Ants in the streets, factories, shops, flies clinging in clusters upon motive things of wood and iron called street cars. They came out of nothing; they were bound nowhere. They desired only to be fed, to sleep, to be amused; and their food, their slumber, their amusements were not means to an end; they were the end in themselves. Spiders in offices, banks, above the swarm, yet seeking only what the swarm sought; spinning their webs, enmeshing material things beyond their utmost need, themselves becoming enmeshed and destroyed--their souls if not their bodies--in their own web. The hive! The futile swarms buzzing in the market place. In a moment of despondency he wished that he might never see it again. He smiled in the dark, a grimace of utter weariness. Why couldn't he think of them except as agitated insects? A mood--a mood. His job--that job--was done. Looking back at the lucent glow above the city, that lingered as an impalpable sheen in the sky after the _Haida_ put the Brockton Point light abeam and the inner harbor was shut away, he felt a sudden relief. His life was his own once more, as much as any man's may ever be. He had shifted the weight off his shoulders. He was going home. After that--