Pay your way! Pay your way! The cry was beating in my pulses as I came away, droning in the car wheels as I traveled northward, dully insistent in the very noises of the streets about me. Once within my own door the warmth enveloped me like summer air and with the warmth came the joyous laughter of the children playing in the dining room. In a bubbling of happy turbulence they came rushing toward me as I looked in upon them, demanding that I judge between them on the rules of their game. "Just because she’s a girl," complained Randolph loudly, indicating Laura, "she always wants to be queen." "It isn’t because I’m a girl," broke in Laura, panting. "It’s because it’s fair. Boys never want to be fair, Uncle Ranny, that’s what’s the matter. He’s been king for half an hour and he always wants us to do impossible things so he can be king forever." "And I want to be king, too," loudly proclaimed Jimmie. I suppressed the nascent revolt as best I could and soothed the passions of pretenders. I reminded them that this was a democracy and that royalty in our land could count only upon a visitor’s welcome. "Aw, don’t I know?" said Randolph fiercely. "I wouldn’t be really truly king for anything." It was a pleasure to me to enter from the turmoil of the outer world to this playing fountain of affectionate young life. Jimmie, Laura, Randolph, little glimmers of spark-like personality were fitfully flickering over their childish heads and it was my task to turn them into steady flames. That was what I owed to my sister Laura and that was the course upon which I was irrevocably embarked. But now, alone in my study, I still hear in the hum and rumor of the streets the insistent imperative cry, Pay your way! Pay your way! *CHAPTER VIII* The incredible has happened. No, not the incredible. The incredible is always happening. It is the impossible that has taken place. I, Randolph Byrd, am now a business man—no priest of the temple, but a brazen money-changer as ever was. The hum and the noise and rattle of it are perpetually in my ears like the whirr of machinery in the brain of the factory hand. I cannot think or put myself in the moods of thought. The sound of the ticker is constantly in my head, and my nerves crave movement. Fred Salmon has accomplished his will. "You must stir it and stump it and blow your own trumpet," is his motto, and he is teaching me to blow. The firm of Salmon and Byrd is an actuality and clownishly Fred is making the most of the humor of the name and doing his best to make me abet him. I say Fred has accomplished it all. But at the bottom it is Laura’s children who are innocently the primal cause of my debâcle.