ows--that I've matched against the rest of them. And I've got them
where they're afraid of me. I can't drop back. Listen to me, Weldon!"

He drew his chair close and talked low and steadily for five minutes.
The air seemed to grow dense; the rustling hiss of the foam on the
creamy beach was the hiss and flicker of a sea-coal fire; the grotesque
shadow of the wicker chair, black on the white verandah floor, was the
spread, silent bulk of a dead man.

The low voice ceased.

"How about it, Weldon?" it added abruptly, "can you afford that?"

Weldon pushed away his chair roughly. "Come down to my room at the
bank," he said.

Hours afterward he dragged himself into his bedroom, an older man by
ten years than when he had quitted it. His body seemed heavier, his
face hollower, with pinched lips and sunken eyes. The man who waited
on him stared openly and mentioned the doctor, only to receive a curse
for his pains--the first he had ever heard from his master.

In the late dusk his wife found him asleep in a long chair with an
empty decanter beside him and heavy rugs dragged up to his chin. They
tried, both of them, to make that nervous chill account for the change
in him, but she watched him narrowly and he felt her eyes day and night.

Something tolled like a bell in him and never stopped for a moment:
_six weeks! six weeks! six weeks!_ all his waking movements went to
that intolerable rhythm; he was like a man under a gallows, with a
reprieve coming to him, at the mercy of all the elements. It was
observed at the bank that he worked harder and longer and much alone:
they said the American blood was coming out at last, and smiled at each
other.

"Only mind you don't engage us in speculations, old man," said one of
his colleagues jocosely, "'safe and sound,' you know! Look at the
States--a pretty mess that!"

Weldon turned on him in a fury of anger.

"Speculation! speculation!" he cried harshly, "you know that I hate it
like hell!"

They were genuinely anxious about him.

One morning he found his wife in his dressing-room, white-faced over
something in her hand.

"Philip! Philip!" she whispered and clung to him.

He put the shining little steel-eyed thing behind him.

"My dear, don't be foolish," he said quietly, "if I have my reasons for
wishing a certain sort of protection for a few days, will you make me
regret my sparing you?"

"You--you mean the bank?" she gasped.

"What else could I mean?" h