After Janet’s death, Sam did not continue his friendship with Edith, but turned over to her the ten thousand dollars to which the six thousand of Janet’s money had grown in his hands and did not see her again. CHAPTER IV One night in April Colonel Tom Rainey of the great Rainey Arms Company and his chief lieutenant, young Sam McPherson, treasurer and chairman of the board of directors of the company, slept together in a room in a St. Paul hotel. It was a double room with two beds, and Sam, lying on his pillow, looked across the bed to where the colonel’s paunch protruding itself between him and the light from a long narrow window, made a round hill above which the moon just peeped. During the evening the two men had sat for several hours at a table in the grill down stairs while Sam discussed a proposition he proposed making to a St. Paul jobber the next day. The account of the jobber, a large one, had been threatened by Lewis, the Jew manager of the Edwards Arms Company, the Rainey Company’s only important western rival, and Sam was full of ideas to checkmate the shrewd trade move the Jew had made. At the table, the colonel had been silent and taciturn, an unusual attitude of mind for him, and Sam lay in bed and looked at the moon gradually working its way over the undulating abdominal hill, wondering what was in his mind. The hill dropped, showing the full face of the moon, and then rose again obliterating it. “Sam, were you ever in love?” asked the colonel, with a sigh. Sam turned and buried his face in the pillow and the white covering of his bed danced up and down. “The old fool, has it come to that with him?” he asked himself. “After all these years of single life is he going to begin running after women now?” He did not answer the colonel’s question. “There are breakers ahead for you, old boy,” he thought, the figure of quiet, determined, little Sue Rainey, the colonel’s daughter, as he had seen her on the rare occasions when he had dined at the Rainey home or she had come into the LaSalle Street offices, coming into his mind. With a quiver of enjoyment of the mental exercise, he tried to imagine the colonel as a swaggering blade among women. The colonel, oblivious of Sam’s mirth and of his silence regarding his experience in the field of love, began talking, making amends for the silence in the grill. He told Sam that he had decided to take to himself a new wife, and confessed that the view of the matter his daughter might take worried him. “Children are so unfair,” he complained; “they forget about a man’s feelings and can’t realise that his heart is still young.”