Henderson looked at it as if it had been a mirror of his own destiny, and expressed his admiration.

“Yes, it’s hard to beat,” Hollowell confessed, with a soft look in his face.  “It’s not for sale.  Seven figures wouldn’t touch it.”  He looked at it lovingly before he put it up, and then added:  “Well, there’s a figure for each, Rodney, and a big nest-egg for the old woman besides.  There’s nothing like it, old man.  You’d better come in.”  And he put his hand affectionately on Henderson’s knee.

Jeremiah Hollowell—­commonly known as Jerry—­was a remarkable man.  Thirty years ago he had come to the city from Maine as a “hand” on a coast schooner, obtained employment in a railroad yard, then as a freight conductor, gone West, become a contractor, in which position a lucky hit set him on the road of the unscrupulous accumulation of property.  He was now a railway magnate, the president of a system, a manipulator of dexterity and courage.  All this would not have come about if his big head had not been packed with common-sense brains, and he had not had uncommon will and force of character.  Success had developed the best side of him, the family side; and the worst side of him—­a brutal determination to increase his big fortune.  He was not hampered by any scruples in business, but he had the good-sense to deal squarely with his friends when he had distinctly agreed to do so.

Henderson did not respond to the matrimonial suggestion; it was not possible for him to vulgarize his own affair by hinting it to such a man as Hollowell; but they soon fell into serious talk about schemes in which they were both interested.  This talk so absorbed Henderson that after they had reached the city he had walked some blocks towards his lodging before he recalled his promise about the message.  On his table he found a note from Carmen bidding him to dinner informally—­an invitation which he had no difficulty in declining on account of a previous engagement.  And then he went to his club, and passed a cheerful evening.  Why not?  There was nothing melancholy about the young fellows in the smoking-room, who liked a good story and the latest gossip, and were attracted to the society of Henderson, who was open-handed and full of animal spirits, and above all had a reputation for success, and for being on the inside of affairs.  There is nowhere else so much wisdom and such understanding of life as in a city club of young fellows, who have their experience still, for the most part, before them.  Henderson was that night in great “force”—­as the phrase is.  His companions thought he had made a lucky turn, and he did not tell them that he had won the love of the finest girl in the world, who was at that moment thinking of him as fondly as he was thinking of her—­but this was the subconsciousness of his gayety.  Late at night he wrote her a long letter—­an honest letter of love and admiration, which warmed into the tenderness of devotion as it went on; a letter that she never parted with all her life long; but he left a description of the loneliness of his evening without her to her imagination.