The change which the Street had marked lay in his face—­it had taken on the subtle imprint of a first frosty day.  He had never looked the power that he was.  Short and slight of build, his head was rather small even for his size, and his features were insignificant—­all except the mouth, whose wide firmness he covered by a drooping mustache, and the eyes, which betrayed always an inner fire.  The trained observer of faces noticed this, however; every curve of his facial muscles, every plane of the inner bone-structure, was set by nature definitely and properly in its place to make a powerful and perfectly cooerdinated whole.  In this facial manifestation of mental powers, he was like one of those little athletes who, carrying nothing superfluous, show the power, force and endurance which is in them by no masses of overlying muscles, but only by a masterful symmetry.

Now, in a year, the change had come over his face—­the jump as abrupt as that by which a young girl grows up—­the transition from middle age to old age.  It was not so much that his full, iron-gray hair and mustache had bleached and silvered.  It was more that the cheeks were falling from middle-aged masses to old-age creases, more that the skin was drawing up, most that the inner energy which had vitalized his walk and gestures was his no longer.

In the mind, too—­though no one perceived that, he least of all—­had come a change.  Here and there, a cell had disintegrated and collapsed.  They were not the cells which vitalized his business sense.  They lay deeper down; it was as though their very disuse for thirty years had weakened them.  In such a cell his consciousness dwelt while he gazed on Trinity Churchyard, and especially upon that modest shaft of granite, three graves from the south entrance.  And the watch on his desk clicked off the valuable seconds, and the electric clock on the wall jumped to mark the passing minutes.  “Click-click” from the desk—­seventy-eight cents—­“Click-click”—­one dollar and fifty-seven cents—­“Clack” from the wall—­forty-seven dollars.

Presently, when watch and clock had chronicled four hundred and seventy dollars of wasted time, he leaned back, looked for a moment on the brazen September heavens above, and sighed.  He might then have turned back to his desk and the table of gross earnings, but for his secretary.

“Mr. Bulger outside, sir,” said the secretary.

“All right!” responded Mr. Norcross.  In him, those two words spoke enthusiasm; usually, a gesture or a nod was enough to bar or admit a visitor to the royal presence.  Hard behind the secretary, entered with a bound and a breeze, Mr. Arthur Bulger.  He was a tall man about forty-five if you studied him carefully, no more than thirty-five if you studied him casually.  Not only his strong shoulders, his firm set on his feet, his well-conditioned skin, showed the ex-athlete who has kept up his athletics into middle age, but also that very breeze and bound of