Of late, a persistent idea had been creeping into his thoughts.  The world was to know him as one of its mightiest rulers—­so mighty that for him a crown would be too tawdry a toy—­but some day he must die.  Who then, demanded his sublimely arrogant self-appraisement, would carry on the work that had called him on to conquest from hills where the burned stumps stood up stark and black in the forest?  It is the hallucination of superlative egotism to imagine that the world demands of her great sons—­a succession.

Whatever gods looked on must have laughed as they read the vast audacity of this man’s conceit.  Never had it occurred to him that such an ambition as his own meant a mere greed for power—­that no great cause or motive impelled him forward.  Never had a whisper come to his soul that power is a trust which should make its recipient a crusader.  The world thought of him as a man of great potentiality.  He thought of himself grown to the proportions and stature of his dreams—­the financial Titan expanded to the nth power.  There must be an heir to this empire of his building.

“I suppose I could marry any woman in the world I wanted,” he reflected as he strode along the hall to the door of his office suite, “but the devil of it is I don’t want any of them.”  A fresh thought brought to his face an expression a shade saner and less self-centered.  “Mary is as beautiful and as charming as I am efficient, moreover she has brains,” he soliloquized.  “Mary must marry brilliantly and her son shall be my successor.”

In a sort of audience hall waited the Coal and Ore directors who had been burning up valuable time and burning up as well a patience unschooled to such delays, but as the door opened and the young field marshal of great business appeared on the threshold, they masked their irritation in smiles.  These men were neither sycophants nor fawning suppliants.  Each of them held high prominence in the aristocracy of wealth, but Hamilton Burton topped them—­and the singular power upon which he had risen was one-half pure charm and hypnotism of personality.  Men might swear at the Hamilton Burton who kept them twiddling their thumbs until he came, yet when he came it seemed that the sunlight came with him and the mists of impatience were dissipated.  A half-hour later he bowed them out, and they went smiling and telling one another as they left, “Remarkable fellow, Burton!  Absolutely surmounts ordinary rules and ordinary difficulties.  Most remarkable and able man!”

He next passed through the outer offices to the door marked “private,” and there, near the window of his sanctum, sat a stout and elderly gentleman.  In the unsparing revelation of the morning sunshine the visitor’s face declared all its wrinkles.  The whitening hair, growing sparse, was carefully combed across an arid patch of scalp.  Hamilton Burton’s smile died and his face grew for a moment solicitous as he read his father’s troubled