“I always have had a high opinion of you, young man,” said he, with laughing eyes.  “Almost as high an opinion as you have of yourself.  Think over the legal side of my plan.  When you get your thoughts in order, let me know—­and make me a proposition as to your own share.  Does that satisfy you?”

“It’s all I ask,” said Norman.

And they parted on the friendliest terms—­and Norman knew that his fortune was assured, if Galloway lived another nine months.  When he was alone, the sweat burst out upon him and, trembling from head to foot, he locked his door and flung himself at full length upon the rug.  It was half an hour before the fit of silent hysterical reaction passed sufficiently to let him gather strength to rise.  He tottered to his desk chair, and sat with his head buried in his arms upon the desk.  After a while the telephone at his side rang insistently.  He took the receiver in a hand he could not steady.

“Yes?” he called.

“It’s Tetlow.  How’d you come out?”

“Oh—­” He paused to stiffen his throat to attack the words naturally—­“all right.  We go ahead.”

“With G.?”

“Certainly.  But keep quiet.  Don’t let him know you’ve heard, if you see him or he sends for you.  Remember, it’s in my hands entirely.”

“Trust me.”  Tetlow’s voice, suppressed and jubilant, suggested a fat, hoarse rooster trying to finish a crow before a coming stone from a farm boy reaches him.  “It seems natural and easy to you, old man.  But I’m about crazy with joy.  I’ll come right over.”

“No.  I’m going home.”

“Can’t I see you there?”

“No.  I’ve other matters to attend to.  Come about lunch time to-morrow—­to the office, here.”

“All right,” said Tetlow disappointedly, and Norman rang off.

XX

In the faces of men who have dominion of whatever kind over their fellow men—­be it the brutal rule of the prize fighter over his gang or the apparently gentle sway of the apparently meek bishop over his loving flock—­in the faces of all men of power there is a dangerous look.  They may never lose their tempers.  They may never lift their voices.  They may be ever suave and civil.  The dangerous look is there—­and the danger behind it.  And the sense of that look and of its cause has a certain restraining effect upon all but the hopelessly impudent or solidly dense.  Norman was one of the men without fits of temper.  In his moments of irritation, no one ever felt that a storm of violent language might be impending.  But the danger signal flaunted from his face.  Danger of what?  No one could have said.  Most people would have laughed at the idea that so even tempered a man, pleased with himself and with the world, could ever be dangerous.  Yet everyone had instinctively respected that danger flag—­until Dorothy.

Perhaps it had struck for her—­had really not been there when she looked at him.  Perhaps she had been too inexperienced, perhaps too self-centered, to see it.  Perhaps she had never before seen his face in an hour of weariness and relaxation—­when the true character, the dominating and essential trait or traits, shows nakedly upon the surface, making the weak man or woman look pitiful, the strong man or woman formidable.