CHAPTER III

THERE was no moral to be adduced from Graham's wak

ing the next morning. He roused, reluctantly enough,

but blithe and hungry. He sang as he splashed in his shower, chose his tie whistling, and went down the staircase two steps at a time to a ravenous breakfast.

Clayton was already at the table in the breakfast room, sitting back with the newspaper, his coffee at his elbow, the first cigarette of the morning half smoked. He looked rather older in the morning light. Small fine threads had begun to show themselves at the corners of his eyes. The lines of repression from the nostrils to the corners of the mouth. seemed deeper. But his invincible look of boyishness persisted, at that.

There was no awkwardness in Graham's "Morning, dad." He had not forgotten the night before, but he had already for given himself. He ignored the newspaper at his plate, and dug into his grapefruit.

"Anything new?" he inquired casually.

"You might look and see," Clayton suggested, good-naturedly.

"I'll read going down in the car. Can't stand war news on an empty stomach. Mother all right this morning?" "I think she is still sleeping."

"Well, I should say she needs it, after last night. How in the world we manage, with all the interesting people in the world, to get together such a dreary lot as that-Lord, it was awful."

Clayton rose and folded his paper.

"The car's waiting," he said. "I'll be ready in five minutes." He went slowly up the stairs. In her pink bedroom Nat

alie had just wakened. Madeleine, her elderly French mai! had brought her breakfast, and she was lying back among te pillows, the litter of the early mail about her and a morning paper on her knee. He bent over and kissed her, perfunctorily, and he was quick to see that her resentment of the evening before had survived the night.

"Sleep well?" he inquired, looking down at her. She evaded his eyes.

"Not particularly.”

"Any plans for to-day?"

"I'll just play around. I'm lunching out, and I may run on with Rodney to Linndale. The landscape men are there to day."

She picked up the newspaper as though to end the discus sion. He saw then that she was reading the society news. and he rather more than surmised that she had not ever glanced at the black headings which on the first page announced the hideous casualties of the Somme.

"Then you've given the planting contract?"

"Some things have to go in in the fall, Clay. For heaven' sake, don't look like a thunder cloud."

"Have you given the landscape contract?"

"Yes. And please go out. You make my head ache.” "How much is it to be?"

"I don't know. Ask Rodney."

"I'll do nothing of the sort, my dear. This is not Rodney' investment."

"Nor mine, I suppose!"

"AI want you to do, Natalie, is to consult me. I wan you to have a free hand, but some one with a sense of re sponsibility ought to check up these expenditures. But it isn only that. I'd like to have a hand in the thing myself. rather looked forward to the time when we could have i sort of country place we wanted."

"You don't like any of the strings to get out of your f gers, do you?"

"I didn't come up to quarrel, Natalie. I wish you wouldn't force it on me."

"I force it on you," she cried, and laughed in a forced and high-pitched note. "Just because I won't be over-ridden without a protest! I'm through, that's all. I shan't go near the place again."

"You don't understand," he persisted patiently. "I happen to like gardens. I had an idea-I told you about it-of trying to duplicate the old garden at home. You remember it. When we went there on our honeymoon

"You don't call that a garden?"

"Of course I didn't want to copy it exactly. It was old and out of condition. But there were a lot of old-fashioned flowers- However, if you intend to build an Italian villa,

naturally—”

"I don't intend to build anything, or to plant anything." For voice was frozen. "You go ahead. Do it in your own way. And then you can live there, if you like. I won't."

Which was what he carried away with him that morning to the mill. He was not greatly disturbed by her threat to keep her hands off. He knew quite well, indeed, that the afternoon would find her, with Rodney Page, picking her way in her high-heeled shoes over the waste that was some day to bloom, not like the rose of his desire but according to the formal and rigid blueprint which Rodney would be carrying. But in five minutes he had put the incident out of his mind. After all, if it gave her happiness and occupation, certainly she needed both. And his powers of inhibition were strong. For many years he had walled up the small frictions > of his married life and its disappointments, and outside that wall had built up an existence of his own, which was the mill.

When he went down-stairs he found that Graham had ordered his own car and was already in it, drawing on his gloves.

"Have to come back up-town early, dad," he called in ex

planation, and drove off, going at the reckless speed he fected.

Clayton rode down alone in the limousine. He had meant to outline his plans of expansion to Graham, but he had har no intention of consulting him. In his own department the boy did neither better nor worse than any other of the dozen. of young men in the organization. If he had shown neithe: special aptitude for nor interest in the business, he had a least not signally failed to show either. Now, paper and pencil in hand, Clayton jotted down the various details of the new system in their sequence; the building of a forging plant to make the rough casts for the new Italian shells out of the steel from the furnaces, the construction of a new spurt little railway which bound the old plant together with its ing steel rails. There were questions of supplies and shippi and bank credits to face, the vast and complex problems the complete new munition works, to be built out of town Pa involving such matters as the housing of enormous numbe, il of employees. He scrawled figures and added them. Ever with the size of the foreign contract their magnitude startle h him. He leaned back, his mouth compressed, the lines fro the nostrils to the corners deeper than ever.

He had completely forgotten Natalie and the country house Outside the gates to the mill enclosure he heard an early exti being called, and bought it. The Austrian premier had bee assassinated. The successful French counter-attack agains Verdun was corroborated, also. On the center of the from page was the first photograph to reach America of a tank. E inspected it with interest. So the Allies had at last show" some inventive genius of their own! Perhaps this was but th beginning. Even at that, enough of these fighting mammoth and the war might end quickly. With the tanks, and the A lied offensive and the evidence of discontent in Austria, tl' thing might after all be over before America was involved

He reflected, however, that an early peace would not be a unmixed blessing for him. He wanted the war to end:

1 killing. He felt inarticulately that something horrible w happening to the world.. But personally his plans were prised on a war to last at least two years more, until the fall of 18. That would let him out, cover the cost of the new pl bring renewals of his foreign contracts, justify those stupendous figures on the paper in his hand.

.

He wondered, rather uncomfortably, what he would do, under the circumstances, if it were in his power to declare pea e to-morrow.

I his office in the mill administration building, he found the gen ral manager waiting. Through the door into the conferoe room beyond he could see the superintendents of the gous departments, with Graham rather aloof and detached, and a sprinkling of the most important foremen. On his desk, neatly machined, was the first tentative shell-case made in the

i machine-shop, an experiment rather than a realization. Tutchinson, the general manager, was not alone. Opposite 1:1 him very neatly dressed in his best clothes, his hat in his hand and a set expression on his face, was one of the boss rollers of 1 the steel mill, Herman Klein. At Clayton's entrance he made a motion to depart, but Hutchinson stopped him.

"Tell Mr. Spencer what you've been telling me, Klein," he said curtly.

Klein fingered his hat, but his face remained set.

"I've just been saying, Mr. Spencer," he said, in good English, but with the guttural accent which thirty years in America had not eliminated, "that I'll be leaving you now."

"Leaving! Why?"

"Because of that!" He pointed, without atentional drama, at the shell-case. "I can't make those shells for you, Mr. Spei cer, and me a German."

"You're an American, aren't you?"

"I am, sir. It is not that. It iss that I—” His face worked. He had dropped back to the old idiom, after years of painful struggle to abandon it. "It iss that I am a German,