Just inside the outer doorway stood two gentlemen; their faces were turned towards the street as they watched the preparations for the upward trip of a great length of metallic cornice. "Why," said Mrs. Bates, as one of them turned half round, "isn't that Tom Bingham, now?" "Yes," said Marshall; "he looks in occasionally." "How do you do, Mr. Bingham?" she said, hastening up to him with a jocular cast in her eye. She knew the Bingham Construction Company as the builders of a score of handsome residences, and of as many of the vast structures which towered all over the business district. It seemed droll to her to find him here, giving personal heed to mere alterations and repairs. "What will be the next thing--building-blocks? Let me send you a box of them, I beg of you." Bingham turned round altogether--a tall, stalwart man whose face was full of the serenity that comes from breadth and poise, but whose mind, as she herself knew well enough, was too habituated to the broad treatment of big matters to have any aptitude for repartee and chatter. She liked to disconcert him, and it was usually an easy thing to do. "And I wish, while you have your hand in, you would just come up and nail some weather-strips on my dining-room windows." Bingham smiled slightly. "Send on your blocks," he said--"if you think they will help me any _there_." He pointed towards the cornices of the building opposite. Above their broken skyline a tall steel frame (on the next street behind) rose some two hundred feet into the air; along the black lines which its upper stage etched against the sky a dozen men swarmed in spidery activity and sent down the sharp clang of metal on metal to the noisier world below. "Mine, too," he said, shortly, as if the vast monument were its own sufficient spokesman. He seemed proud of himself and of the town where such things could be accomplished. Mrs. Bates flashed forth a look full of admiration for both man and work. "I'll take that all back about the weather-strips; but if you _could_ bring up your kit to-morrow morning and make us an extra coal-bin in the furnace-room---Too proud for that, too? Well, then, just come up to dinner to-morrow evening--only the family. And bring your sister, if she'll accept on such short notice." The other gentleman, whom Mrs. Bates had overlooked, and indeed forgotten, turned round. "You know Mr. Belden, Mrs. Bates?" was Marshall's introduction.