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 and then he suddenly turned an accusing glance upon the old man. "And why was I not permitted to know?" he reproached.

"Because you had shown that knowingly you would not allow it," replied the old financier. "It was your wife's aspiration to be at least as noble and generous as you were."

"Noble! Me? Pah!" said George Judson, with a gesture of bitterness. He leaned now against the desk, and his external eye was gazing at the proxy, but his mind was busy with a sequence of awful regrets.

"Damned bombastic pride again!" he was saying to himself. "I wouldn't tell them frankly, and I wouldn't let them know. Therefore they couldn't tell me—and therefore all these needless, agonizing fears of loss of factory control—and why, we might have understood each other all along if—"

This was the train of his thought, and he was so absorbed by it that he did not notice that the door opened softly and that a very small person in the uniform of an American soldier had entered it—an unusually smart uniform, topped off with the overseas cap and finished by a swagger stick. This trim, smart figure in the exquisitely tailored uniform clicked heels and saluted—a diminutive figure for a uniformwearer, say about the figure of a boy of eight years. The rose of health was upon his cheeks,