-ward. Feeling each day a day of adversity and giving no hint, he
recognized, yet refused to admit, the dawn of defeat when defeat was far
past its dawning. Upon the world of allied assailants that pressed him
back--back--ever back on dwindling millions and then shrinking hundreds
of thousands he turned a fierce and unsurrendering face. To himself he
said even now that his star was infallible.

But in the privacy of his own bedroom, when no alien eye penetrated his
solitude, his bitterness was epic and terrible. In the consistency of
that egotism which had first made, then unmade him, there was no room
for remorse; no possibility of self-accusation. If his star was to set
it would set on his last terrific stand against the squares of the
enemy, with the old guard about him ... and when the end came, like
another Antony, he would fall on his own sword.

And always to the sunken-eyed anxiety of his mother, and the puffy-eyed
misgivings of his father and the quaking terror of his brother, he gave
back laughing assurances of his unquenchable power. To them he treated
as technicalities, which he would casually brush aside. Federal
prosecutions and Congressional investigations and the solid phalanx of
financial interests that constantly drew their strangling cordons around
him. He never admitted to others or to himself as a possibility the
reckoning which was sure beyond question. Yet except for a detail of
months--or weeks--he was as irremediably ruined as though already the
tape of the stock-ticker had spelled out its unemotional announcement,
"Hamilton Burton cannot meet his obligations." He had been wounded
through the one vulnerable joint of his armor: his great self-pride and
unquestioning assurance were struck to the quick of the heart. His day
was done.

Since he had lost in dozens and scores of millions and could return to
his preeminence only by mighty leaps, he plunged again in dozens and
scores of millions, as befitted a mighty gambler. And in scores he lost
and in scores again he plunged--to his ruinous and total undoing.

* * * * *

As the Burton fortunes were dwindling, Loraine Haswell, who had come now
from the Riviera to Paris, found her state of mind reaching an anxiety
that threatened first her composure, then almost her reason. She knew of
her husband's ruin, and had written him a letter of condolence rather
more human than any of her other communications to him had been