Jefferson Edwardes obeyed the command and raised his eyes to the commanding voice.  “Perhaps,” he announced in a guarded tone, “it is, in a fashion, dread of the wrath to come—­though my conscience is clear.  But you”—­in his half-whisper she caught an eager note of hope—­“why aren’t you asleep?” She shook her head and in the moon-bath her face flashed into a luminous smile.  “I am working up that wrath,” she assured him.  “I am preparing to be terribly angry with you tomorrow.”

“And until tomorrow?”

“Until tomorrow I am very happy.  Good-night.”

“Tomorrow is always—­tomorrow, dearest—­” he said, “Good-night.”

* * * * *

A many-sided man was J.J.  Malone, with a nature as brilliant and as capable of flashing varying lights from its facets as a diamond—­and when need be as hard as a diamond.  Had he lived in feudal times other barons would have said, “Where Malone sits there is the head of the table,” and the monarch himself would have taken thought before provoking his wrath.  In these days of alleged intolerance for tyrants he dispensed with the fanfare of trumpets and the tossing of flambeaux.  The door of his office in a gray shaft-like building down-town bore the simple inscription, “American Transportation Co., President’s Office.”

Many men to whom the mighty money leverage of “Consolidated” was a familiar story had heard of J.J.  Malone only in the casual sense.  Yet the oligarchy had been built and rendered, supposedly, impregnable from the conceptions of his constructive brain.  Concentration of power into one vast unit had been “Consolidated’s” triumph—­and his realized dream.  Always the master tactician had been he who unobtrusively wore the title of president of “American Transportation.”  To others he had relinquished title roles, but, unseen, he had set and managed the stage.  Hamilton Burton had been taught at Malone’s knee, but Hamilton Burton was young and hot with vitality, aflame with ambition.  From Malone himself he had absorbed the principle, “Never forget that today’s ally may be tomorrow’s enemy.  Be prepared to use him—­or crush him.”  In secret Burton had been building to that end, and only he himself knew the full reserve force of his resources.

“You are about the only man in the Street, sir,” declared young Bristoll one morning, in a burst of admiration, as he and his chief sat together over their coffee, “to whom J.J.  Malone seems willing to grant an equality of status.”

Hamilton Burton smiled.

“That is true just now, Carl,” he replied.  “It can not always remain true.”

“Why?”

“Our young Minister of Finance sees the present in just proportions,” laughed Burton.  “But his vision has not yet mastered the horizons of the future.”

Carl flushed.  He knew that for all the flattering confidence to which he was admitted, many broadly conceived pictures moved across the screen of his employer’s mind of which he was vouchsafed no intimation.