As though his eyes followed a compass needle, he slowly swung them until his gaze set toward his desire, and because vaguely he thought of New York as the center of the great outer world, his face was to the south.

The wind moaned about him and somewhere far off he heard the ripping groan of an overladen tree giving way under its paralysis of sleet.  In himself he felt something also breaking away from its old place.  He felt forces rending their bonds and straining for freedom, and it almost seemed to his burning eyes that while he gazed toward that spot hundreds of miles away which he had never seen, there slowly kindled in the sky a pale and luminous aura, such as hangs over the spires and shafts of a giant city.  His fancy pictured the unsainted halo that gleams above thronged and never-sleeping streets:  streets that always beckon.  Vague echoes of sounds came toward him, warring in the teeth of the wind; sounds of the many voices and the many clamors that merge into one dull, insistent roar:  the voice of the city.

So he stood there shivering and not realizing that the frost was shrewdly biting him.  His spirit was the spirit of a hatching eaglet impatiently rapping at the shell which too slowly opens to give it freedom.

“What I did to Slivers Martin,” he told himself, “I can do to the rest of them.  There ain’t much difference between doin’ big things an’ little things, except that you’ve got to be where there are big things to do an’ you’ve got to know you can do ’em.”

Part II

THE BOOK OF LIFE

IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

CHAPTER V

It was eight o’clock, and the year as well as the day was in its morning.  The watch which young Carl Bristoll drew from his pocket was very thin and exquisite, and he did not look at its face.  Instead he touched a delicate spring with his finger-nail and listened to the tinkle of its low, silvery chime.  This watch might have spoken the hour to a blind man as well as to eyes as clear and engaging as those of its present possessor.

In some Swiss shop, where for generations an hereditary skill of adept fingers had come down from father to son, a master of his craft had toiled long and lovingly over this thin disc of gold which epitomized in its small circumference a perfection of accuracy and beauty.  Because it was a prince’s plaything and because the young Titan of finance who employed Carl Bristoll as his confidential secretary had brought it back by way of an affectionate gift from his last trip to the Continent, the lad prized it above other possessions.  To young Bristoll, who was no unwilling wage-earner, but a hero-worshiper in all the intensity of strong youth, it had been as if an emperor had pinned on his breast the insignia of personal regard.