From the day of their first meeting, Henry Nelson and Calvin Gray had clashed.

No two people could be more different in disposition and temper, hence it was only natural that every characteristic, every action of the one should have aroused the other's antagonism.

Nelson was a cool, selfish, calculating plodder with little imagination and less originality; he thought in grooves.

His was a splendid type of mind for a banker.

He had but one weak point--_viz_., a villainous temper, a capacity for blind, vindictive rage--a weakness, truly, for a man who dealt in money--but a weakness that lent him a certain humanity and without which he would have been altogether too mechanical, too colorless, too efficient.