She stopped and scrutinized her embroidery, a naïve pattern of rose and urn and motto. He drew a long breath; that was the first tangible indication he had had of the working out of his planning, the justification of his sacrifice. “I admire father,” she went on once more, conversationally; “my love for you hasn't blinded me to his qualities. He has a surprising courage and vigor for an—— Why, he must be nearly seventy! And now he has the most extraordinary plan for what he calls 'getting the better of you.' He was as nice with me as possible, but I could see that he thinks you're lost this time.... No, the darker green. Alexander, don't you think the words would be sweet in magenta?” “Well,” he demanded harshly, leaning forward, “what is this plan?” She looked up, surprised at his hard impatience. “How queer you are! And that's your iron expression; you know it's expressly forbidden in the house, after hours. His plan? I'm certain there's no disloyalty in telling you. Isn't it mad, at his age? And it will cost him an outrageous amount of money. He is going to change the entire system of all his forges and furnaces. It seems stone coal has been found on his slopes; and he is going to blow in with that, and use a hot blast in his smelting.” Alexander Hulings sat rigid, motionless; the cigar in his hand cast up an unbroken blue ribbon of smoke. Twice he started to speak, to exclaim incredulously; but he uttered no sound. It seemed that all his planning had been utterly overthrown, ruined; in a manner which he—anyone—could not have foreseen. The blowing in of furnaces with hard coal had developed since his entrance into the iron field. It had not been generally declared successful; the pig produced had been so impure that, with working in an ordinary or even puddling forge, it had often to be subjected to a third, finery fire. But he had been conscious of a slow improvement in the newer working; he had vaguely acknowledged that sometime anthracite would displace charcoal for manufacturing purposes; in future years he might adopt it himself. But John Wooddrop had done it before him; all the square miles of timber that he had acquired with such difficulty, that he had retained at the sacrifice of his best property, would be worthless. The greater part of it could not be teamed across Wooddrop's private roads or hauled advantageously over a hundred intervening streams and miles. It was all wasted, lapsed—his money and dreams! “It will take over a year,” she went on. “I don't understand it at all; but it seems that sending a hot blast into a furnace, instead of the cold, keeps the metal at a more even temperature. Father's so interested you'd think he was just starting out in life—though, really, he is an old man.” She laughed. “Competition has been good for him.”