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 with all its ramifications and its good-will, and one-third of it all was his beyond anybody's power to take away. But what were millions, what was the machine, if he lost his power to drive it?

"The business is sound, but I am unsound," he accused himself hollowly, with a feeling of awful chagrin, then gazed again at that stretching canopy of steel and concrete with a wide and wistful eye.

He thought of his dream of making this a vast industrial brotherhood, a workman-owned plant, a happy shop, the happiest and most efficient shop in America, and reproached himself bitterly for having loosely lost the oppor tunity to serve his workmen as he had meant to serve them. He called himself their betrayer. He called himself a blindly optimistic, weakwilled fool.

But there came just now a tapping at the door followed by the entry of Blakeley, faithful and watchful to the last.

"Mr. Mumford to see you, sir," he said.

Mumford! George started angrily at the name. It was bland old Mumford who had advised him to put his faith in Templeton & Co., instead of in Blodgett, Tompkins, and Haley. But could the three have thrown him down any more completely than Simon? George doubted it. Why, they might even have