“I have heard something about your meeting up at Montreal, and my daughter has told me certain facts that occurred last night--facts that stamp you a hero----” “Sir!” “Facts that make me proud to know you, young man. Let no false modesty cause you to belittle the deed. I claim that when a man takes his life in his hands and imperils it for parties unknown to him, who may be in danger, he rises above the ordinary plane and becomes a hero. Let us not argue the subject then. I am glad to meet you for your own sake--glad to know you. Let us sit down again. I have something to say that is of deepest importance to me.” He drops into a chair, with one of them on either side. Both the young men show signs of excitement, and the veteran speculator is the cool one. Aleck is saying to himself: “Dorothy has told him how she came to know me--what can he want to see me for,” and his bachelor heart persists in keeping up a trip-hammer accompaniment that is rather singular in a man who has been born and reared in the country of ice and snow. As for Wycherley, his thoughts run about in this wise: “Here’s Samson Cereal, the great grain operator, king of the wheat pit. Let me study him well, since fate has decided that I am to be in the same line. What would he say if he knew I had plunged on the markets and came out two million ahead on yesterday’s deal--what, indeed? I must use my ears--who knows but what in the course of his everyday talk he may drop some hints that I may seize upon, and use as a ladder upon which to mount to future success.” “Mr. Craig, am I right in presuming that this is the gentleman who was with you last night on the Midway?” begins the operator. “We were together much of the evening. In one sense he has as much claim upon your thanks as myself, for only through him was I enabled to do Miss Dorothy a service,” replies Aleck, with the generous impulse of making his comrade “solid” with the great manipulator of wheat. Samson Cereal gravely turns and holds out his hand. “Allow me, sir; I appreciate the favor,” he says in the singularly deep voice that has many a time electrified the swaying masses of brokers and operators on change. “You are perfectly free to speak upon any subject, sir,” adds Aleck. “That being the case, I will no longer pique your curiosity, gentlemen. Am I right in believing that you have through accident learned certain things connected with a very wretched episode in my life?” Aleck’s cheeks flush under his gaze, for somehow he feels as though Samson reproaches him. “I beg you to believe, sir, I have not pried into your private affairs through morbid curiosity. A peculiar chain of circumstances, link fastened to link, one thing leading to another, has given me some knowledge of certain unhappy events far back in your life. I have not sought them, and once in my possession they shall go no further, depend upon it.”