Page:The council of seven.djvu/43



There was something almost feline in the movements of Saul Hartz. So cat-footed was his progress about the Office that he was continually taking his staff by surprise. It made for efficiency, no doubt, this liability to be overlooked and incidentally "to be fired" at short notice; but in the opinion of the more Olympian spirits who lived under his ægis such tactics were hardly worthy of one so august. They were content to suffer them all the same. Saul Hartz in everything insisted on being a law unto himself.

He was very much a law unto himself to-night.

"What do you make of it?" So like the man to get through at once, without preface or apology, to a leading question. The book, at that moment, was the one thing that mattered to the Colossus. "Bright fellow that?" He did not disdain to answer his own question; it was his method, as a rule, of asking another. "But!" He tapped a finger of rue, half humorous, half melodramatic upon the center of an immense forehead, "just a weeny!" As he drummed again an odd puckering of the eyelids somehow became truly comic. "I'm sorry to have to say so."