He put the trinket back into his waistcoat pocket, and strolled to the windows that gave off over the Drive and the Hudson.  The softly arching sky found its color echo in the blue of broad waters and beyond them the Palisades were already beginning to show tenderly green and alluring in spring’s resurrection.  Out in midstream lay the crouching hulk of a battleship, and its somber gray was the one note that contradicted the softness of the morning.

Bristoll turned his face again to the interior, where a flood of sun from the broad window at the back filled the place with eastern light.  He never tired of that room, the library where his chief dispatched those matters of more urgent business that pursued him even to his home.  It was a room that might have served a potentate as a council-chamber with its treasury of almost priceless art, yet it reflected everywhere the quiet of faultless taste and the elegance born of a restrained and sure discernment.

“And all of it,” Carl Bristoll murmured to himself, as he awaited the coming of its master, “he made for himself in a scant ten years, and he stands only at the threshold of his career!” That often repeated formula was a sort of daily tonic with which his ambition reminded itself that life holds no prize locked behind impossible barriers for him who has the courage and resolution to grasp it.  Yet had he been older he would have added, “The impossible is only possible to the child of Destiny.”

He heard a quiet movement behind him, and turned to find the butler standing at his elbow with a tray of early mail, into which the secretary plunged, separating the purely personal from those letters which the great man saw only through his subordinate’s eyes.

“I’m not at all sure, Mr. Bristoll, that the master will rise early,” volunteered the servant.  “He was with his sister until midnight, and after that Mr. Paul came in and I heard him playing the piano, sir, as late as three o’clock.”

Carl laughed.  “I had a call from him on the ’phone an hour ago,” he answered.  “He spoke of a busy day ahead, and suggested an early start.  There are some men, Harrow, who find rest simply in changing the brain’s occupation.”

“Yes, sir, quite so,” admitted the butler dubiously.  “Still, as the poet says, sir, it’s sleep that ‘knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,’ sir.  Sometimes I have apprehensions that the master will overtax his strength.”

“I didn’t know, Harrow,” smiled the secretary, “that you were a disciple of the poets.”

“Only, sir, in an unostentatious way,” deprecated the man.  “It has been my good fortune to serve in families where such niceties have been highly regarded, sir, and, I take it, advantageous associations reflect themselves in one’s tastes, sir.  But—­” he dropped his voice, and came a step nearer—­“but, sir, if you will pardon me, sir, I should like to ask a question.  You know, of course, that the master’s sister arrived last night from Europe?”