Page:Stanwood Pier--The ancient grudge.djvu/264

Rh round. Please sit down and, besides being comfortable, do your best to look it."

Floyd understood that Colonel Halket was in an exacting mood and submitted. When he had settled himself in an armchair by the fire-place and had lighted the cigar, his grandfather began to pace slowly back and forth with his thumbs hooked in the arm-holes of his waistcoat.

"Floyd," he said at last, "this night marks the crowning achievement of my life. I think I may say without vanity that all I have ever heretofore done—and it has not been little—is as nothing in its possibilities for beneficent and far-reaching results compared to what I have this evening accomplished. It is a thing that I have long dreamed of, and I thank God that I have been spared to consummate it. To-night you have seen taken—you have witnessed with your very eyes—the grandest step, as I believe, to advance the cause of labor that has been made in half a century."

"Labor!" cried Floyd, taking his cigar from his mouth and staring. "Labor!"

"Labor," repeated Colonel Halket, and his sonorous utterance seemed to breathe into the word all the nobility that should by tradition be associated with it. "For a time I felt that having brought about in my own mills a relation between capital and labor which I may go so far as to term ideal, and having published my book, my philosophy of an employer's life, I had contributed my utmost to the cause of industrial civilization. I felt that my work was finished, and that men might learn from me, so to speak, both by example and by precept—if they would. But, Floyd, a man is not happy when he feels that his work is done. I chafed under the feeling; and then one day there flashed upon me this idea for further work and usefulness."

"How did it come?" asked Floyd; his grandfather's pause seemed to demand some remark. "What suggested it?"