seeing Sumarakoff blush-the first time since he was a small boy and had been caught by his father's major-domo undermining an almond cake freshly baked for a great dinner-party. "I say 'happily,' because, beautiful and wealthy as she is, Miss Dalmy can never be a wife for Prince Sumarakoff," resumed Count Donskoi. An exclamation from the prince made him continue hastily: "When I first noticed your penchant for the young lady, the intimacy between you, I conceived it to be my duty-under the circumstances to discover if there could be any reasonable objection to such a―er -connection. The investigation was most easy to conduct, the results such as I feared. Miss Dalmy herself gave me the first clew. Shall I give you the details of the report my men have sent me, or are you content with my statement of the fact that Miss Dalmy is no match for Prince Sumarakoff?" "Miss Dalmy is fit to be the wife of the greatest! How dare you say she is no match for Prince Sumarakoff?" cried the young man. For an instant an expression of pity, of sympathy, flitted across Count Donskoi's usually impassive countenance, but he did not hesitate. "Prince Sumarakoff can never marry the daughter of one of his father's liberated serfs," he said quietly. The prince took a step forward and then sank into a chair beside his writing-table, his face white and set. time to educating and improving himself, so that he became a distinguished-looking and cultivated man. Late in life-in the year 1880, to be exact he married a young American girl, a native of New Orleans. She was very beautiful and well connected, but poor. Her family, it appears, knowing nothing of Dalmy's antecedents or history, were greatly pleased at the brilliant match she was making. A daughter, Marie, was born to the couple in 1881, and a year later both parents were carried off by yellow fever. The child grew up with her mother's people, knowing nothing of her father's relatives, rich, petted, accomplished, beautiful, but no less truly the daughter of Prince Sumarakoff's freed serf." Count Donskoi continued to gaze thoughtfully out the window after he had ceased to speak, and for a long while there was silence in the room. A strangled sob aroused him. He got up and went over to the writing-table where Sumarakoff sat, his miserable face hidden in his folded arms. As he looked down on the wretched young prince the expression of pity and sympathy flitted once again and more lingeringly across his dark face. "I tried to save you as much as I could— to prevent you from seeing too much of her until I could be sure. I cabled and telegraphed and hurried my men, so that you would not be exposed an hour longer than necessary to the danger of being with her. I am sorry not to have been able to do better than I have. It is very hard, I know "It is some hideous lie! Tell me every- she is most beautiful, most lovely, all that thing!" he muttered. Count Donskoi drew another paper from his leather wallet and ran his eye over it. "This is thestory," he said gravely. "In 1862 Nicholas Dalmy, a young serf about twenty-five years of age, belonging to the Smolensk estates of Prince Alexis Sumarakoff, having been previously liberated by the edict of '61, left Russia and came to America. He went to New Orleans and, being of unusual brightness and capability, quickly learned the language and obtained employment. During '63 and '64 he made large sums of money by daringly running the cotton blockade, and so laid the foundations of a fortune which he increased to enormous proportions during the following twenty years. It appears that he not only amassed a fortune, but he devoted much a man could love and respect and admire. To an American, what I have told you would mean less than nothing. That it should be an insurmountable obstacle to marriage is the unhappy fortune of Prince Sumarakoff." The young man rose from his chair and turned a haggard face to Donskoi. "I should like to be alone," he said sim ply. The older man bowed. At the door he paused an instant. "Everything is in readiness. We leave at six in the morning," he said tentatively. The prince hesitated an instant and then made an infinitely weary gesture of assent. With another fugitive look of pity at the white young face, Count Donskoi bowed once more and passed from the room. DAN CONROY'S TRIUMPH By Edward W. Townsend ILLUSTRATIONS BY THORNTON OAKLEY RANK CONROY'S teachers in the lower grades of the public schools early reported that he had a natural aptitude for mathematics which should be given scope. Dan, the father, heard of this, and though "natural aptitude" and "scope" were terms he did not understand, he understood later when the principal of the high school said the boy ought to have a chance in some profession. So Dan left his work an hour early one day, and waited before the schoolhouse to learn at first hand what future for his son this special gift might suggest. Small, but sturdy and erect, his clothes daubed with the soil of the street trench in which he had worked, a battered dinner bucket in his hand, Dan intercepted the principal with a respectful, "I beg your pardon, sir, but could I have a word with you about my boy?" "Another complaint," thought the principal wearily, and asked, "What is your boy's name?" "Frank Conroy, sir," "answered the laborer; and the principal, noting the manliness looking out of the other's clear, honest gray eyes, knew that if it were a complaint he was to listen to it would be a reasonable one. "He tells me that you are saying that he has a fine head for figures; something uncommon, sir, I think you were saying,' added Conroy. They had a long talk, in which Dan received the impression that his son's mathematical mind was a gift from the principal, but this, though there seemed something odd about it, did not perplex the old man so much as to learn that mathematics was the foundation science upon which eminence in many industrial professions or callings was built. That to design a towering building, span a river with a bridge, or push a tunnel under the same river required a knowledge of mathematics, filled the workman's mind with wonder and delight; wonder, because he had thought such things were devised by some mystery-wisdom allied to magic; delight, because it suddenly made him exultant with a new ambition. Was not his son a mathematician! "And could my boy, if he sticks to this job of studying figures, get to be one of those mechanical engineers you tell of?" Dan asked. "Even my son?" he added, his glance falling on his own rough clothes and his battered dinner bucket. The principal answered with an encouraging smile, "There is no royal monopoly of knowledge, any more than there is a royal road to it." "I thank you, sir," said Dan, and he was as uplifted as if he held a warrant for his boy's greatness in his hands—as in truth he did. He walked home through a fairyland which became no less fairy-like when his way led him into a poor neighborhood where two rooms of a tenement were home to him and his one motherless child. Dan Conroy had always liked best to labor where he could see the results of engineering skill, see the very men who planned the great works upon which he toiled in the humblest capacity. They were to him the greatest of men, greater, even, than those for whom he also worked, the political bosses. The engineer's craft had for him the pleasure-giving quality which the sculptor's, even the musician's art, has for many; but that the skill he so much admired was acquirable by study, was a mental accomplishment, not a gift, had not until now entered his mind. Suddenly a vision was revealed to him: his own boy might become one of these masters; and the vision grew in brightness until the room where he now prepared the evening meal seemed suffused with the light which illumined his mental prospect. He was happily crooning an Old-Country ballad when Frank entered the room and smiled at his father a moment before he vigorously announced: "I'm going to leave school, dad. I've got a job!" "Sure, then, there's two of them," said the father, setting down the teapot on the oilcloth-covered table. "I've a job for you as well." "Not so good as mine," exclaimed the youth. "I'm going into a shipping department where I'll have a chance to be a shipping clerk, some day. What do you think of that?" "Well, it's a nice gentlemanly job, Frankie, but I have a better one." "Better than a shipping clerk? It must be a good one!" "It is so, lad; you're to be a boss." "A precinct boss?" "Better nor that," responded Dan, enjoying the youngster's look of wonder. "A district boss? I'll have to be twenty years older." "Better nor that, too." 'Oh, you're joking, dad. There's only one man bigger than a district boss; and there's too many after that job for me to hope for it, even when I'm grown up." "Well, my boy, I'll be fooling you no longer; it's no kind of a political boss at all. You're to be a boss of works. You'll be one of these here bosses what builds bridges and ships, and things the likes of those. That's what you'll be, for the schoolmaster told me the way of it." Frank flushed and stared; this hint of a dream to come true was too wonderful to be met with quick speech. The young man had the elder's veneration for the engineer's profession; it was an inheritance, endowing with activity brain cells which solved so quickly for him the perplexities of mathematics; love of a skill in the father turned into an aptitude for that skill in the son. But Frank was a practical youth, and though he sometimes dreamed, yet he acknowledged conditions, and the one he now felt incumbent upon him was to leave school and earn his bread. "It's engineers, Frankie, who build things; and engineers get their trade from arithmetic, as the schoolmaster was telling me. And he says to me that if I keep you in the high school for your two years more you can get into the school they have for those things. What's this he calls them?" "Polytechnics." "Tis not the law of the land, but the law of a father's love I'm obeying, lad. I want to see you the boss of works. I want to see you telling others what to do, and not always be told, like me. I want to see the big men come to you and say, 'Can we have a bridge here, Mr. Conroy?' and 'What will it cost?' says they. And 'Will we put the electric power on the cars, Mr. Conroy?' says they to you, and you tells them what's what. Ah, my boy, that's the kind of a boss you'll be; and to see you doing those grand things, making travel cheap, making work easy, making great things where there was little things, changing the city this way and that, like a fairy in one of those stories your mother used to tell you-and you'd open your eyes big at hearing them-that's what I want to see you doing. Have you no word for the new fairy story I'm telling you? You had as many as a lawyer when your mother told you tales no better, and not so true.' And the story came to the life of the boy as it came to the laborer in his vision. They lived in what many would call poverty, but were content with their manner of living, for the vision did not fade. Their poor rooms, meals, clothes, were never deplored; they were the signs of a willing sacrifice to the great purpose of both their lives. Instead of ever a despondent thought, Dan Conroy thanked fortune that his small political service was rewarded with the certainty of daily toil on city work. He noted with secret pleasure the respect in which even young engineers were held by the mighty contractors; listened in silent enjoyment to the wonder-tales fellow-laborers repeated about the big wages earned by engineers. Frank was an enthusiastic student, stood high in his class, and places for such as he were waiting for more pupils than the polytechnic graduated. His professional rise was faster than merit alone would have made it, but no faster than his abilities warranted. He was employed by a company having large municipal contracts, and a district boss who kept a friendly eye on faithful Dan Conroy's boy may have "But, dad, I can't let you support me six hastened the young man's promotion. In a "'Twas the very word he was using, but I disremembered. That would be four years more, again.' few years he finished his shop experience and passed from the charge of small contracts to the superintendency of important works. Dan fretted that he never was employed as a laborer where he could see his boy as a boss, but Frank looked differently at this whole matter; he tried to dissuade his father from going on with any daily toil. When he rented a little house in a convenient suburb, where they had a woman to do the household duties they formerly shared, he said: "You needn't work any more, father; my salary is as much in a month as we used to have in a year, and I want you to enjoy leisure and rest. "Leisure, is it? Doesn't that mean the same as idleness? I've never learned how to be idle. I never could. I like best to get tired and then come home and hear you tell what you're doing where you're bossing. I'd like a job on the same work with you." Dan paused after this speech and looked at his son inquiringly. He had made the same suggestion many times, hoping to hear Frank say he would get him a day laborer's place where he could see his son boss, but the son had never given a favorable response. Dan wondered, but would not ask. Some of the anticipated joy in his son's success was not realized; not even when Frank sold the patent-right to an invention for such a wonderful sum that he bought the new home and gave the deed for it to his father who would rather have had one day's work under his boy. As years passed, Frank was more often away from home, sometimes for weeks when directing work at a distance. Then he would send his father papers telling of constructions "in charge of the celebrated engineer, Frank Conroy, of New York." This was more unreal than to hear his son tell of his occupations, and the longing dwelt sleeplessly in the old man's heart to see his boy, his love and pride, as others saw him; commanding, respected, obeyed. "There'll not be many more years for me at a day's work," he sighed, "and unless I see the lad bossing a job I'll never believe in my heart that it's all real. I'll speak to him when next he has a contract near by, and ask him to let me work under him for a bit, until I satisfy my eyes. Then I'll be willing to give up work-though what I'll do without work, sure I don't know." When Frank next returned from an ab There was a hitch in the old man's voice as he replied: "God bless you-and her. I know she's a good girl, Frank, for you had a good mother, and the sons of such turn to good women." "The dearest and best woman in the world is Mary Holden." Dan looked at his son, standing a head taller, a fine man of thirty, handsome, strong, but only a lad in the father's eyes, and gasped before he asked slowly, "Not the president's daughter?" "Yes," answered the younger man with a laugh, "daughter of Mr. Holden, president of the company. Young Holden was a classmate of mine at the Tech, and invited me to the house, first, two or three years ago, and then I met Mary. The president came to see the finish of the work out West, and Miss Holden was with him. I returned on their private car with them, and when we arrived we were engaged.' He gave his father a hug, pushed him into a chair, and said with a pretended frown, "Now, dad, I've a lecture for you: you made a good job of bringing me up, considering the raw material you had to work with, but I failed to bring you up properly. I want you to stop work and be a gentleman, such a gentleman as Miss Holden should have for a father-in-law.” "She'd be ashamed to have her father-inlaw a working man?" Dan asked quietly. "It's not that, dad, but you must think of me." "You are not ashamed of me, Frank?" "Ashamed of you! I'd be ashamed of myself if I were, "the young man responded heartily. "I've been dull in trying to make myself understood. Listen: I want Mary to respect me, as well as care for me. I've told her all about you; how you struggled long and hard to give me an education; how you saw the way to make something of me, and did it. She knows all that, for I've boasted of it-boasted of it for you, dad. But now, after all you've done for me, what would she think if she knew that you still worked hard when I'm |