hundreds on the sidewalk were gentle with
him, seeing that he was an old man; perhaps the strength of excitement
nerved him, for he made his way down the street to the flight of steps
leading to the door of a tall white building, and he crowded himself up
among the pack that was striving to enter. He had even got so far that
he could see the line pouring in above his head, when there was a sudden
cessation of motion in the press, and one leaf of the outer iron doors
swung forward, meeting the other, already closed to bar the crush, and
two green-painted panels stood, impassable, between him and the last of
the Dolph fortune.

One howl and roar, and the crowd turned back on itself, and swept him
with it. In five minutes a thousand offices knew of the greatest failure
of the day; and Jacob Dolph was leaning--weak, gasping, dazed--against
the side wall of a hallway in William Street, with two stray office-boys
staring at him out of their small, round, unsympathetic eyes.

Let us not ask what wild temptation led the old man back again to risk
all he owned in that hellish game that is played in the narrow street.
We may remember this: that he saw his daughter growing to womanhood in
that silent and almost deserted house, shouldered now by low tenements
and wretched shops and vile drinking-places; that he may have pictured
for her a brighter life in that world that had long ago left him behind
it in his bereaved and disgraced loneliness; that he had had some vision
of her young beauty fulfilling its destiny amid sweeter and fairer
surroundings. And let us not forget that he knew no other means than
these to win the money for which he cared little; which he found
absolutely needful.

After Jacob Dolph had yielded for the last time to the temptation that
had conquered him once before, and had ruined his son's soul; after that
final disastrous battle with the gamblers of Wall Street, wherein he
lost the last poor remnant of the great Dolph fortune, giving up with it
his father's home forever, certain old bread of his father's casting
came back to him upon strange waters.

[Illustration]

Abram Van Riper came to the daughter of the house of Dolph, a little
before it became certain that the house must be sold, and told her, in
his dry way, that he had to make a business communication to her, for he
feared that her father was hardly capable of understanding such matters
any longer. She winced a little; but he took a load off