“And now, Stephen, as to this boy.  You and I have done our best to make him think the world is wrong side up; but I am more to blame because I had the better opportunity to study his development, beneath my own eyes.  I taught him that imagination was an essential ingredient of a successful business man, to enable him to grasp each situation as a whole, and to conceive its dangers and its possibilities.  Yet, when he exercised that very quality, and came to me frankly with the results of his efforts, I refused to recognize my own handiwork.  I taught him my altruistic creed, and then blamed him when he used it as his standard, and was unhappy that those around him failed to measure up to it.  Never has a man been more blind than I. Never has a man settled back, so self-satisfied, with so determined a conviction that because he willed things to be so, then they were so.  I have merged the white thread of my new creed with the black one of the old business morals I first learned; his pattern has been wholly woven from the white.

“My boy,” he added, turning to Allen, “for the first time in my life I ask a man’s forgiveness.  In the face of the greatest discouragements, you have shown yourself true, and I congratulate you and your father upon the future which you have before you.  I want you to stay with me until the Consolidated Companies has been placed in a position of safety to itself and to its stockholders, then you may choose your own career.”

“No Sanford ever made a failure yet,” Stephen proudly repeated.

“But, Mr. Gorham—­” Allen began, surprised into confusion by the unstinted praise; but Alice interrupted him.

“So this is my business creation!” she exclaimed, with satisfaction.  Allen looked first at her and then at Mr. Gorham.  Then he smiled consciously.

“While you are about it, Mr. Gorham,” he said, impulsively, “I wish you would disintegrate Alice and Mr. Covington.”

A momentary shadow passed over the faces of all who knew what had occurred.

“That dissolution took place last night,” Mr. Gorham replied, quietly.

Alice’s cheeks were flaming, but her smile was irresistible as she spoke.

“I’ll tell you all about it, Allen, if you’ll come into the conservatory.”

XXXI

A great event requires retrospective consideration.  Unlike the laws of perspective, distance gives it greater size.  So it was with Gorham’s supreme and final demonstration of his strength.  To Covington, who, true to his promise of the night before, was present at this crucial meeting of the Board of Directors, and marvelled that his chief demanded of him only a statement regarding the real purchaser of the stock, this dissolution of the Consolidated Companies appeared as an act of sacrilege; to his associates, aghast at the knowledge that they were powerless to prevent him, it seemed the epitome of treachery; to his family it meant a sublime exhibit of self-sacrifice;—­to himself it was the crowning point of his career, and a justification of his life-work.