Bristoll nodded.  He himself had not yet had the privilege of seeing the young woman, the fame of whose loveliness had preceded her:  a loveliness which had enthralled men from the Irish Sea to Suez.

“Of course, sir, it’s not for me to entertain opinions, but—­” The butler paused in evident embarrassment, and the secretary’s eyes narrowed a little.

“You are quite right, Harrow,” he asserted shortly.  “I can’t see that you are required to express any opinion.”

“Of course, sir, I was only going to say—­”

“Well—­don’t say it.”

But, for all his obsequiousness, the admirable Harrow was a persistent diplomat.

“No, sir, of course I sha’n’t.  I was only going to ask you—­”

The secretary looked up with an impatient frown on a forehead shaped for resolution.

“All right.  Ask me and have it over.”

“I was going to inquire, sir, whether you regard it likely that the new mistress would—­as I might say, sir—­institute any sweeping changes of regime in our milieu?  Things have gone on very well, sir, as they were.”  The interrogation carried a note of sharp anxiety:  the apprehension of a petty monarch who might face the fate of being deposed.

“I don’t know.”  The reply was curt, and Harrow with a bow said only, “Yes, sir, thank you.  I was just speculating on the possibilities, sir.”

For a while there was silence in the library as Bristoll ran through letter after letter, his hand racing over the stenographer’s pad upon which he reduced their purport to succinct notes.  He always enjoyed these responsible mornings with his chief because they were times of intimate association with a mind that directed colossal operations, and they savored almost of the importance of cabinet meetings.

Often, as he read the fluctuations of the ticker tape or glanced at financial scareheads in the evening papers, he smiled knowingly with the memory of a sentence spoken at the breakfast-table or an edict uttered in this library, which had been the motive power behind the news; and which to the world at large remained an unseen impulse.

Now Bristoll heard a quick step coming down the stairs with a schoolboy’s buoyant lightness and the whistling of a popular air.  It might have been a college sophomore arriving light-heartedly from his cold plunge, rather than the Titan whose word in the Street was already a thing which no one of the older money-kings could ignore.

Carl Bristoll rose, and Hamilton Burton broke off his whistling to smile gaily as he clapped the younger man on the shoulder and inquired with a voice remarkably soft and musical, “Well, how is our young Minister of Finance this morning?”