Page:The council of seven.djvu/91

 words. He took pains to adjust them to every fresh mind with whom he was brought in contact. In his daily intercourse with all sorts and conditions of people he prided himself upon the faculty of saying neither too little nor too much.

"One only knows," Norton answered, "that about twelve o'clock last night he fell down dead as he entered the Cosmopolitan."

"No more than that?" The careless tone, the veiled eyes took all significance out of the question.

Such was the limit of Norton's knowledge of the matter, except that Mr. Gage had given him to understand that he was required to write a leader on the subject whose scope the Chief himself would indicate.

Saul Hartz made no immediate comment on this rather dry answer. He seemed oddly silent and constrained. For the first time in Norton's knowledge of him there was a look of indecision in his face. Suddenly he said with a change of key so curious as to be a little startling to one who knew him so well: "I've changed my mind. We'll postpone this Garland leader." He hesitated an instant, and then his voice changed again. "Tell Mr. Gage I would like a further word with him." It was that tone of the high potentate which was apt secretly to amuse men like Norton who were constitutionally incapable of reverence.

The editor of the Planet obeyed the summons at once. He seemed a bundle of nerves as he came into the room. But his relief was keen when he was curtly