a little working girl in New York, a girl with tired eyes and a
patient smile, with the faded hair and the faded skin which came from
too few hours of recreation--from too many uninterrupted hours of
plodding grind at the tasks her employers set for her, a girl who
would have been as pretty as Hermia Challoner if her youth had only
been given its chance. This was Dorothy Herick, whose father, a
friend of Markham's father, had been swallowed up in one of the great
industrial combinations which Peter Challoner had planned. Markham,
who had been studying in Paris at the time, had forgotten the details
of Oliver Herrick's downfall, but he remembered that the transaction
which had brought it about had not even been broadly in accordance
with the ethics of modern business, and that there had been something
in the nature of sharp practice on Peter Challoner's part which had
enabled him to obtain for his combination the mills in the Wyoming
Valley which had been in the Herrick family for three generations.

Markham knew little of business and hated it cordially, but he had
heard enough of this affair to be sure that, whatever the courts had
decided, Oliver Herrick had been unfairly dealt with and that a part,
at least, of Peter Challoner's fortune belonged morally, at least, to
the inconsiderable mite of femininity who read proof in a publisher's
office in New York. He knew something of the law of the survival of
the fittest, for he himself had survived the long struggle for honors
which had put him at last in a position where he felt secure at least
from the pinch of poverty, and whatever Oliver Herrick's failings
among the larger forces with which he had been brought into contact,
Markham knew him to have been an honest man, a good father and a
faithful gentleman. Something was wrong with a world which pinched
the righteous between the grindstones of progress and let the evil
prosper.