l its visions fell tumbling about
their heads in sudden and awful catastrophe. For with Tomlinson's first
descent to the rotunda it broke. The whole great space seemed filled
with the bulletins and the broadside sheets of the morning papers, the
crowd surging to and fro buying the papers, men reading them as they
stood, and everywhere in great letters there met his eye:

COLLAPSE
OF THE ERIE AURIFEROUS

THE GREAT GOLD SWINDLE

ARREST OF THE MAN TOMLINSON
EXPECTED THIS MORNING

So stood the Wizard of Finance beside a pillar, the paper fluttering in
his hand, his eyes fixed, while about him a thousand eager eyes and
rushing tongues sent shame into his stricken heart.

And there his boy Fred, sent from upstairs, found him; and at the sight
of the seething crowd and his father's stricken face, aged as it seemed
all in a moment, the boy's soul woke within him. What had happened he
could not tell, only that his father stood there, dazed, beaten, and
staring at him on every side in giant letters:

ARREST OF THE MAN TOMLINSON

"Come, father come upstairs," he said, and took him by the arm,
dragging him through the crowd.

In the next half-hour as they sat and waited for the arrest in the
false grandeur of the thousand-dollar suite-Tomlinson, his wife, and
Fred-the boy learnt more than all the teaching of the industrial
faculty of Plutoria University could have taught him in a decade.
Adversity laid its hand upon him, and at its touch his adolescent heart
turned to finer stuff than the salted gold of the Erie Auriferous. As
he looked upon his father's broken figure waiting meekly for arrest,
and his mother's blubbered face, a great wrath burned itself into his
soul.

"When the sheriff comes--" said Tomlinson, and his lip trembled as he
spoke. He had no other picture of arrest than that.

"They can't arrest you, father," broke out the boy. "You've done
nothing. You never swindled them. I tell you, if they try to arrest
you, I'll--" and his voice broke and stopped upon a sob, and his hands
clenched in passion.

"You stay here, you and mother. I'll go down. Give me your money and
I'll go and pay them and we'll get out of this and go home. They can't
stop us; there's nothing to arrest you for."

Nor was there. Fred paid the bill unmolested, save for the prying eyes
and babbling tongues of the rotunda.

And a few hours from that, while the town was still ringing with news
of his