After a vague, disconcerted moment he shrewdly divined exactly what would occur. He said nothing to Cryble, seated with his back toward him; and even Gisela looked with silent inquiry at his absorption throughout supper. She never questioned him now about any abstraction that might be concerned with affairs outside their pleasant life together. The inevitable letter at last arrived, announcing the fact that, in a partition settlement of Veneada's estate by his heirs, it was necessary to settle the expired mortgage. It could not have come, he realized, at a more inconvenient time. He was forced to discuss the position with Cryble; and the latter heard him to the end with a narrowed, searching vision. “That money out of the business now might leave us on the bank,” he asserted. “As I see it, there's but one thing to do—go over all the timber, judge what we actually will need for coaling, buy that—or, if we must, put another mortgage on it—and let the rest, a good two-thirds, go.” This, Alexander acknowledged to himself, was the logical if not the only course. And then John Wooddrop would purchase the remainder; he would have enough charcoal to keep up his local industries beyond his own life and another. All his—Alexander's—planning, aspirations, sacrifice, would have been for nothing. He would never, like John Wooddrop, be a great industrial despot, or command, as he had so often pictured, the iron situation of the state. To do that, he would have to control all the iron the fumes of whose manufacture stained the sky for miles about Harmony. If Wooddrop recovered an adequate fuel supply Alexander Hulings would never occupy a position of more than secondary importance. There was a bare possibility of his retaining all the tracts again by a second mortgage; but as he examined that, it sank from a potentiality to a thing without substance. It would invite an investigation, a public gleaning of facts, that he must now avoid. His pride could not contemplate the publication of the undeniable truth—that what he had so laboriously built up stood on an insecure foundation. “It is necessary,” he said stiffly, “in order to realize on my calculations, that I continue to hold all the timber at present in my name.” “And that's where you make a misjudgment,” Cryble declared, with an equal bluntness. “I can see clear enough that you are letting your personal feeling affect your business sense. There is room enough in Pennsylvania for both you and old Wood-drop. Anyhow, there's got to be somebody second in the parade, and that is a whole lot better than tail end.”