nd coat and
joined me.

"Drive to the bank, Micah," I said, "I want to get there like
lightning."

"Can you wait till I speak to mammy? She is bringing the baby."

For the first time since our marriage my nerves got the better of me,
and I answered her sharply.

"No, I can't wait--not a minute, not a second. Drive on, Micah."

In obedience to my commands, Micah touched the horses, and as we sped
down Franklin Street, Sally looked at me with an expression which
reminded me of the faint wonder under the fixed smile about Miss Mitty's
mouth.

"What's the matter, Ben? Are you working too hard?" she enquired.

"I'm tired and I'm anxious. Do you realise that we are living in the
midst of a panic?"

"Are we?" she asked quietly, and arranged the fur rug over her knees.

"Do you mean to tell me you hadn't heard it?" I demanded, in pure
amazement that the thing which had possessed me to madness for three
months should have escaped the consciousness of the wife with whom I
lived.

"How was I to hear of it? You never told me, and I seldom read the
papers now since the baby came. Of course I knew something was wrong.
You were looking so badly and so much older."

To me it had needed no telling, because it had become suddenly the most
obvious fact in the world in which I moved. Only a fool would gaze up at
the sky during a storm burst and remark to a bystander, "It thunders."
Yet even now I saw that what she realised was not the gravity of the
financial crisis, but its injurious effect upon my health and my
appearance.

"You've been on too great a strain," she remarked sympathetically; "when
it's all over you must come away and we'll go to Florida in the
General's car."

To Florida! and at that instant I was struggling in the grip of
failure--the failure of the successful financier, which is of all
failures the hardest. Not a few retrenchments, not the economy of a
luxury here and there, but ultimate poverty was the thing that I faced
while I sat beside her on the soft cushions under the rich fur rug. One
by one the familiar houses whirled by me. I saw the doors open and shut,
the people come out of them, the sunshine fall through the budding trees
on the sidewalk; and the houses and the moving people and the budding
trees, all seemed to me detached and unreal, as if they stood apart
somewhere in a world of quiet, while I was sucked in by the whirlpool.
Though I lifted my voice and called aloud to them, I felt that