"Well, I've never forgotten that green persimmon tree by the roadside," pursued the great man, "and the way you stopped under it and said, 'O Lord, wilt Thou not work a miracle and make persimmons ripen in the spring?'" "No, I'd forgotten it," rejoined Gabriel coolly, for he was hurt by the piece of flippancy and was thinking the worst of Cyrus again. "You'd forgotten it? Well, I've a long memory, and I never forget. That's one thing you may count on me for," he added, "a good memory. As for John Henry--I'll see James about it. I'll see what James has to say." When Gabriel had gone, accompanied as far as the outer door by the secretary, Cyrus turned back to the window, and stood gazing over a steep street or two, and past the gabled roof of an old stone house, to where in the distance the walls of the new building of the Treadwell Tobacco Company were rising. Around the skeleton structure he could see the workmen moving like ants, while in a widening circle of air the smoke of other factories floated slowly upward under a brazen sky. "There are too many of them," he thought bitterly. "It's competition that kills. There are too many of them." So rapt was his look while he stood there that there came into his face an expression of yearning sentiment that made it almost human. Then his gaze wandered to the gleaming tracks of the two great railroads which ran out of Dinwiddie toward the north, uncoiling their length like serpents between the broad fields sprinkled with the tender green of young crops. Beside them trailed the ashen country roads over which farmers were crawling with their covered wagons; but, while Cyrus watched from his height, there was as little thought in his mind for the men who drove those wagons through the parching dust as for the beasts that drew them. It is possible even that he did not see them, for just as Mrs. Pendleton's vision eliminated the sight of suffering because her heart was too tender to bear it, so he overlooked all facts except those which were a part of the dominant motive of his life. Nearer still, within the narrow board fences which surrounded the backyards of negro hovels, under the moving shadows of broad-leaved mulberry or sycamore trees, he gazed down on the swarms of mulatto children; though to his mind that problem, like the problem of labour, loomed vague, detached, and unreal--a thing that existed merely in the air, not in the concrete images that he could understand. "Well, it's a pity Gabriel never made more of himself," he thought kindly. "Yes, it's a pity. I'll see what I can do for him." At six o'clock that evening, when the end of his business day had come, he joined James at the door for his walk back to Bolingbroke Street. "Have you done anything about Jones's place in the bank?" was the first question he asked after his abrupt nod of greeting. "No, sir. I thought you were waiting to find out about Oliver."