After the rites were over, the family returned to their city home, but only for the night; for preparation had been already completed for their removal to Rockhold, there to pass the year of mourning.

Old Aaron Rockharrt never changed from his look of stony immobility.  If he mourned for his patient wife of more than half a century, no outward sign betrayed his feelings.  If his spirit suffered with suppressed grief, his strong frame bore up under it without the slightest weakening.

On the afternoon of his return from his wife’s funeral he shut himself up in his library and remained there all the evening, refusing to come to dinner, calling for a bottle of wine and a sandwich and desiring afterward to be left alone.

Later in the evening he sent for Mr. Fabian to come to him, and there opened to his eldest son and partner, in whose business talents he had great confidence, a scheme of speculation so venturous, so gigantic that the younger man was shocked and staggered, and began to lose faith in the sound intellect of the Iron King.

“This will make us twice told the wealthiest men in the United States, if not in the whole world,” concluded Old Aaron Rockharrt.

“If it should succeed,” said Mr. Fabian, dubiously.

“It shall succeed; I say it.  We shall go down to Rockhold to-morrow morning and the next day to the works, and there I shall give my whole mind to this matter and make it succeed, do you hear?  Make it succeed!  And place my name at the head of the list of wealthy men of this age.”

Mr. Fabian did not dare to raise any objection.

“I am pleased, sir,” he said, “that you find in this new enterprise an object of so much interest to engage your mind.  Employ me in any way you think fit.  I am quite at your service, as it is my bounden duty to be.”

“Very well; that is as it should be.  Now I am going to bed.  Good night,” said the Iron King, abruptly dismissing his son, then rising and ringing for his valet, whose office, since the patient old lady’s death, was now no longer a sinecure.

It seems passing strange that a man of seventy-six years, who had just lost his life-long and beloved companion—­for in his own selfish way he loved her after a sort, and perhaps more than he loved any human being in the world—­and who must expect before many years to follow her, should be so full of this world’s avarice and ambition; so eager to make more, and more, and more money, and to stand at the head of the list of all the wealthiest men in the land.  Strange, yet the name of such a one is legion.  But in the case of Old Aaron Rockharrt there might have been this additional motive—­the necessity to seek refuge from the pains of grief and remorse in the anxieties and activities of speculation.  So he was very eager to get back as soon as possible to business and to enter at once upon the enterprise he had planned.

Cora was also anxious to leave the city, which she knew was in a fresh ferment of gossip and conjecture on the subject of her lost husband, the deceased governor-elect.  The news from the Indian Territory had renewed all the public interest in the mystery of his disappearance.