d thoughts had all to do with
an arrangement wherein life should yield him the compensating delights
which his family denied.

Loraine's fastidiousness rather shuddered at this idea, yet perhaps a
certain sort of character disintegration had set in, with her first
cutting loose the moorings of preconceived standards. Possibly it was
working a more rapid atrophy than she knew. She told herself that, in
her exile, Carlos made a rather diverting companion, and that since she
understood his purpose she could with ease control the situation. He
should amuse and no more. If his hints became less ambiguous than she
found agreeable, she would send him packing, but meanwhile she would
permit his luncheons and his motors to serve her. The food and roads
about Nice are excellent--and expensive.

CHAPTER XXVIII

There is in the western hemisphere one town whose local news is national
news and international news. Its celebrities wear names which the nation
mouths over with gusto, and its own name was, until comparatively
recently, New Amsterdam. The country closely followed the first-column
stories with which the press sought to keep abreast of the affairs of
Hamilton Montagu Burton. It was interesting reading, for it dealt with a
late potentate of power untold; now an invalid whose brain slept like a
child taking its forenoon nap while his millions, counted in scores and
hundreds, went back to their sources as the sun draws water into the
clouds to spill it out again elsewhere. A giant of untold might had
kindled the fires that slept at the heart of a volcano--and then had
fallen asleep upon the slopes down which the lava must flow!

While he slept, Ruin, spelling itself with a capital letter, had
signaled out the one pedestaled figure which had laughed at ruin, and
mocked its potency and bragged of a star which was above menace.

Hamilton Burton lay for weeks in insensibility and delirium and when, in
returned consciousness, he realized his predicament he raved like a
madman against restraint, counting the precious moments, which were
being used against him, bleeding him of vital power. This very fretting
against the inevitable burdened him with a waste of nerve and brain
which should send him forth, depleted in strength and weakened in
resistance, to meet his adversaries.

Nor had the forces aligned against him marked time. When again he took
the field he must take it in a realm of altered and shrunken boundaries,