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actually to the fact that he was stricken suddenly one day of cerebral thrombosis and there was” time only to be rushed from the Loop office to her home in Bench Street, where he died, speaking no word and looking to the last remarkably able and fierce. But still he did die there and was buried from there.
    And after the funeral the famous will was read. That, too, in Gertrude’s house, and obscurely Amelia blamed her for it, as if, had the thing taken place in her house, the will would have proved more suitable.
    But still in effect there was an odd mother-son, father-daughter, mother-son pattern. Gertrude Haviland Shore and her son, Rowley Shore. John Haviland and his stepdaughter, Daphne. Miss Amelia Haviland and Dennis Haviland.
    Not that Amelia was in any possible sense motherly. But she had in a remote, detached way done her duty by this son of a distant Haviland; had given him a home and cod-liver oil, schooling and dancing lessons and braces on his teeth, sundry effective disciplining. Had seen to it that Dennis had everything in the way of good schools, travel, and social background that Gertrude had given her own son.
    From almost the first, too—after the death of that other Daphne—Daphne had been, but more remotely, in their charge. The aunts saw to clothes and dentists; and later, chaperoning. But after all, Daphne was a girl; the other two were boys. They brought them all up as cousins and Havilands. But Daphne would grow up and marry out of the family.
    She would marry out of the family and, which was more important, out of any possible connection with the Haviland Bridge Company.
    For this family had a center, a spring, a tenacious, sturdy core, and that was the business. The plant. The Haviland Bridge Company. They lived by it; it usurped their greatest and deepest interests; it was not only a source of income, it was a well of pride; and it was deeply personal, blood of their blood and bone of their bone.
    It had been that from the first to old Rowley Haviland. He was domineering, shrewd, fiercely possessive as he grew older, and notional; he had had to incorporate, and he had hated that and had hated the men who invested money in Haviland Bridge stock, though he used them and the money they brought. He kept to the last the control of the thing in his own hands.
    But he came to the end of his furious, engrossed career in perplexity. His daughters were not men. And his son, Johnny Haviland, was not the man, he felt, to undertake the management of the company. There had been rocky times in the not far distant past. There were more rocky times to come. Johnny had his uses and his values; there was no one who could keep the stockholders in good temper when dividends were low better than Johnny; nobody who could better soothe and manipulate a delicate situation. Johnny was handsome, charming, social—all those things had their uses, as Rowley Haviland knew. But he needed a man with force and drive and, when necessary, ruthlessness. He needed, too, he realized sadly, a man with brains.
    So he looked about for such a man and found him. It was not easy—neither the decision nor the training and advice he had to give—for Rowley Haviland was jealous of his own power to the last. But his love for his company—the thing he had made through years of sweating labor and anxiety, sleepless nights, grueling days when he’d learned hard lessons of self-preservation—years of wariness, of selfishness, of grim and determined fighting for his own existence and devil take the hindmost—his love for the thing he’d built out of those years was greater than his hatred for the man who would eventually take his place. So he selected Benjamin Brewer, a man of about thirty-five; young enough to give the company years of vigor and usefulness, old enough to have business judgment and acumen. But then Ben Brewer had been born with all that, and it matured under Rowley Haviland’s teaching. Force and drive and hardness; no