terrible
danger from which he had only escaped by the skin of his teeth. Then he
dropped his hands from his face and drew a long breath, the kind of
breath a man draws who has been battling with the waves and finds
himself on the shore, exhausted but still alive.

Stafford laid a hand on his shoulder, and Sir Stephen started and
looked up at him as if he had forgotten his presence. A flush, as if of
shame, came upon the great financier's face, and he frowned at the
papers lying before him, where they had dropped from his hand.

"What an escape, Stafford!" he said, his voice still rather thick and
with a tremour of excitement and even exhaustion in its usually clear
and steady tone. "I am ashamed, my boy, that you should have been a
witness to my defeat: it humiliates, mortifies me!"

"Don't let that worry you, father," said Stafford, scarcely knowing
what he said, for the tumult in his brain, the dread at his heart.

"It is not the first defeat I have suffered in my life; like other
successful men, I have known what it is to fall; and I have laughed and
got up and shaken the dust off myself, so to speak, and gone at the
fight again, all the harder and more determined because of the reverse.
But this--this would have crushed me utterly and forever."

"Do you mean that it would have ruined you completely, father?" said
Stafford.

"Completely!" replied Sir Stephen in a low voice, his head drooping. "I
had staked everything on this venture, had staked even more than I
possessed. I cannot explain all the details, the ramifications, of the
scheme which I have been working. You could not understand them if I
were to talk to you for a week. Suffice it, that if I had failed to get
this concession, I should have been an utterly ruined man, should have
had to go through the bankruptcy court, should have been left without a
penny. And not only that: I should have dragged a great many of the
men, of the friends who had trusted to my ability, who have believed in
me, into the same pit; not only such men as Griffenberg and Wirsch and
the Beltons, but the Plaistows, the Clansdales, and the Fitzharfords.
They would have suffered with me, would have, considered themselves
betrayed."

Stafford drew a long breath. There seemed to him still a chance of
saving himself, the girl he loved, above all--his honour.

"But even if it were so, father," he said; "other men have failed,
other men have been defeated, ruined, and left penniless