lf. He sat still and watched her,
probably because the business side of his nature judged that he could
be of no use. The fur-lined cloak was now lying in the easy-chair, and
there was nothing to break the sweeping lines of the black velvet from
her dazzling shoulders to her waist, to her knee, to her feet. Mr. Van
Torp watched her in silence, till she sat down again.

'You know me well enough to understand that,' he said, going on. 'My
outside's my business side, and that's what matters most. Now the
plain truth is this. My engagement to Miss Bamberger was just a
business affair. Bamberger thought of it first, and suggested it to
me, and he asked her if she'd mind being engaged to me for a few
weeks; and she said she wouldn't provided she wasn't expected to marry
me. That was fair and square, anyway, on both sides. Wasn't it?'

'It depends on why you did it,' said the lady, going to the point
directly.

'That was the business side,' answered her companion. 'You see, a big
thing like the Nickel Trust always has a lot of enemies, besides a
heap of people who want to get some of it cheap. This time they put
their heads together and got up one of the usual stories. You see,
Isidore H. Bamberger is the president and I only appear as a director,
though most of it's mine. So they got up a story that he was operating
on his own account to get behind me, and that we were going to quarrel
over it, and there was going to be a slump, and people began to
believe it. It wasn't any use talking to the papers. We soon found
that out. Sometimes the public won't believe anything it's told, and
sometimes it swallows faster than you can feed to it. I don't know
why, though I've had a pretty long experience, but I generally do know
which state it's in. I feel it. That's what's called business ability.
It's like fishing. Any old fisherman can judge in half an hour whether
the fish are going to bite all day or not. If he's wrong once, he'll
be right a hundred times. Well, I felt talking was no good, and so did
Bamberger, and the shares began to go down before the storm. If the
big slump had come there'd have been a heap of money lost. I don't say
we didn't let the shares drop a couple of points further than they
needed to, and Bamberger bought any of it that happened to be lying
around, and the more he bought the quicker it wanted to go
down, because people said there was going to be trouble and an
investigation. But if we'd gone on, lots