in dignified rebuke for the
noisy demonstrations he so often looks down upon, and where the Marquis
de Lafayette turns his back on the square and gazes at the
moving-picture posters of Fourteenth street.

For a minute or two the younger brother sat in nervous silence, and,
when he spoke, he put his question in a voice of anxious concern.
"Aren't you alarmed, Hamilton?"

"Alarmed?" The other raised his brows and smiled. His face was placid.
"Don't you remember, Paul, what Charles Fox once had to say on the
subject? At least he got the credit for saying it, which comes to the
same thing. 'A man of power has no other such luxury as being mobbed in
his carriage.'"

"I wasn't thinking of just that. I know you aren't afraid of any
physical attack. I was wondering what it all prophesies. We musicians
can feel the crescendo coming from the first mounting bars. Everywhere
there is a spirit of unrest; of revolution. Doesn't it mean a crash--a
panic?"

Again the man whose brain had turned the base metal of poverty into the
gold of Croesus smiled.

"I'm not a betting man, Paul, but I'd be willing to lay a moderate wager
that within the next year or two we shall see a panic that will leave
many scars and not a few wrecks."

"And that conviction doesn't alarm you?" The musician let his features
mirror his nervous surprise. If the principal had no fear, at least the
dependent was in terror.

The amusement left Hamilton Burton's eyes and into them came the harder
gleam. "Paul, you know as little about finance as I know about music.
I've done what I've done by following one law: the leashing of forces.
Electricity is force, but electricity unharnessed is lightning which
devastates. Fire, uncontrolled, ravages, but, held in check, makes
power. Every force in a man's nature that is not curbed becomes a
weakness. The only difference between success and failure is the twist
given to the initial impulse. Every danger and peril, if foreseen and
met, becomes opportunity."

Paul shook his head. "As you say," he admitted, "I don't understand
these things. I thought panics were hurricanes that swept fortunes
away."

The elder brother laid an immaculately gloved hand on the coat-sleeve of
the younger.

"It's a thing I wouldn't confide to any one else, but I trust you even
if I don't give a damn for your judgment. As you say, hurricanes mean
ruin--for the unprepared, but there are also men to whom hurricanes
mean--salvage."

For a