ad within me.

"Well, it won't do any harm to go into Townley's and find out about it,"
I said, moving in the direction of the broker's office next door.

CHAPTER XXX

IN WHICH SALLY PLANS

My first sensation after putting Sally's ten thousand dollars into
copper mining stock was one of immense relief, almost of exhilaration,
as if I already heard in my fancy the clanking of the loosened chains as
they dropped from me. I recalled, one by one, the incidents of my
earliest "risky" and yet fortunate venture, when, following the
General's advice, I had gone in boldly, and after a short period of
breathless fluctuation, had "realised," as he had said, "a nice little
fortune for a first hatching." And because this seemed to me the single
means of recovery, because I had so often before in my life been guided
by some infallible instinct to seize the last chance that in the outcome
had proved to be the right way, I felt now that reliance upon fortune,
that assurance of the thing hoped for, which was as much a portion of
experience as it was a quality of temperament.

At home, when I reached there late in the afternoon, I found Sally just
stepping out of the General's buggy, while the great man, sacrificing
gallantry to the claims of gout, sat, under his old-fashioned linen dust
robe, holding the slackened reins over the grey horse.

"We've got a beautiful plan, Ben, the General and I," remarked Sally,
when he had driven away, and we were entering the house; "but it's a
secret, and you're not to know of it until it is ready to be divulged."

"Is George aware of it?" I asked irrelevantly, moved by I know not what
spirit of averseness.

"Yes, we've let George into it, but I'm not perfectly sure that he
approves. The idea came to the General and to me almost at the same
instant, and that is a very good thing to be said of any idea. It proves
it to be an elastic one anyway."

She talked merrily through supper, breaking into smiles from time to
time, caressing evidently this idea, which was so elastic, and which she
declined provokingly to divulge. But I, also, had my secret, for my
mind, responding to the springs of hope, toyed ceaselessly with the
possibility of escape. For several weeks this dream of ultimate freedom
possessed my thoughts, and then, at last, when the copper trade, instead
of reviving, seemed paralysed for a season, I awakened with a shock, to
the knowledge that I had lost Sally's little fortune a