e chairs full, but standing room only was available in the offices.

Their occupants came from all classes; clerks from up-town dry-goods
houses, who had run down during lunch time to see whether U.P. or Erie,
or St. Paul had moved up an eighth, or down a quarter, since they had
devoured the morning papers on their way to town; old speculators who
had spent their lives waiting buzzard-like for some calamity, enabling
them to swoop down and make off with what fragments they could pick up;
well-dressed, well-fed club men, who had had a run of luck and who never
carried less than a thousand shares to keep their hands in; gray-haired
novices nervously rolling little wads of paper between their fingers and
thumbs--up every few minutes to listen to the talk of the ticker, too
anxious to wait until the sallow-faced young man with the piece of chalk
could make his record on the board. Some of them had gathered together
their last dollar. Two per cent. or one percent, or even one-half of one
per cent. rise or fall was all that stood between them and ruin.

"Very sorry, sir, but you know we told you when you opened the account
that you must keep your margins up," Breen had said to an old man. The
old man knew; had known it all night as he lay awake, afraid to tell his
wife of the sword hanging above their heads. Knew it, too, when without
her knowledge he had taken the last dollar of the little nest-egg to
make good the deficit owed Breen & Co. over and above his margins,
together with some other things "not negotiable"--not our kind of
collateral but "stuff" that could "lie in the safe until he could make
some other arrangement," the cashier had said with the firm's consent.

Queer safe, that of Breen & Co., and queer things went into it. Most of
them were still there. Jack thought some jeweller had sent part of his
stock down for safe-keeping when he first came across a tiny drawer of
which Breen alone kept the key. Each object could tell a story: a pair
of diamond ear-rings surely could, and so could four pearls on a gold
chain, and perhaps, too, a certain small watch, the case set with
jewels. One of these days they may be redeemed, or they may not,
depending upon whether the owners can scrape money enough together to
pay the balances owed in cash. But the four pearls on the gold chain are
likely to remain there--that poor fellow went overboard one morning off
Nantucket Light, and his secret went with him.

During the six m