to another audience chamber. That day the third assistant
cashier greeted him with politeness carefully graded to the due of a
man merely moderately rich and not a factor in the game of high finance.

"Be seated, Mr. Dumont," he said, pointing to a chair just inside the
railing--a seat not unworthy of a man of rank in the plutocratic
hierarchy, but a man of far from high rank. "I'll see whether Mr.
Melville's disengaged."

Dumont dropped into the chair and his heavy head was almost immediately
resting upon his shirt-bosom. The third assistant cashier returned,
roused him somewhat impatiently. "Mr. Melville's engaged," said he.
"But Mr. Cowles will see you." Mr. Cowles was the third vice-president.

Dumont rose. The blood flushed into his face and his body shook from
head to foot. "Tell Melville to go to hell," he jerked out, the haze
clearing for a moment from his piercing, wicked eyes. And he stalked
through the gateway in the railing. He turned. "Tell him I'll tear
him down and grind him into the gutter within six months."

In the hansom again, he reflected or tried to reflect. But the lofty
buildings seemed to cast a black shadow on his mind, and the roar and
rush of the tremendous tide of traffic through that deep canon set his
thoughts to whirling like drink-maddened bacchanals dancing round a
punch-bowl. "That woman!" he exclaimed suddenly. "What asses they
make of us men! And all these vultures--I'm not carrion yet. But THEY
soon will be!" And he laughed and his thoughts began their crazy spin
again.

A newsboy came, waving an extra in at the open doors of the hansom.
"Dumont's downfall!" he yelled in his shrill, childish voice. "All
about the big smash!"

Dumont snatched a paper and flung a copper at the boy.

"Gimme a tip on Woolens, Mr. Dumont," said the boy, with an impudent
grin, balancing himself for flight. "How's Mrs. Fanshaw?"

The newspapers had made his face as familiar as the details of his
private life. He shrank and quivered. He pushed up the trap. "Home!"
he said, forgetting that the hansom and driver were not his own.

"All right, Mr. Dumont!" replied the driver. Dumont shrank again and
sat cowering in the corner--the very calling him by his name, now a
synonym for failure, disgrace, ridicule and contempt, seemed a subtile
insult.

With roaring brain and twitching, dizzy eyes he read at the newspaper's
account of his overthrow. And gradually there formed in his min