“First thing, I want to wire for Banning. He’s the head of our house. This thing’s too big for me to handle alone. I’ve got to get Banning here as soon as wheels can bring him. Then—oh, confound that bell! It sounds like something out of Dante!” “I must go!” she told him. He was tempted to smile for a moment at what seemed like terror on her face. But there were certain things he had not forgotten. “And what will you do with me?” he asked, holding her back by one white hand. “You’ll have to go down by the back stairway,” she whispered. “But I’m not going for long,” he stoutly asserted as he held her face up to the light. “From to-day,” he said, as he stooped and kissed her impassive lips, “the new era begins, and you’ll see me back to-morrow—with trumpets blowing.” CHAPTER EIGHT It was not with trumpets blowing, and it was not the next morning, that Conkling returned to the tumble-down old manor-house overlooking Lake Erie. It was before sundown of the same day that he returned. And he went back without the reasons for doing so being altogether clear to his own mind. It was a movement born of subliminal propulsions as vague yet as compelling as those of a young mother creeping through midnight darkness to the disturbingly silent crib of the new life she had brought into being. Conkling had thought, at first, to have Banning join him, for now that the movement had taken on dimensions so bewildering he felt the need not so much of pilotage from the older man as of partnership in the knowledge of a fact which had the power of leaving him a bit dizzy. Yet his efforts to connect with Banning over the long-distance telephone had not met with success, and the mere despatch of a telegram, worded as judicially as he could contrive it, brought no sense of response and no companionable easing off of his own excitement.