lf of emotion in advance. If
what he expected were to come to pass, the first essential to his
playing the man at all would lie in his keeping cool.

So, on reaching his office, he brought all his knowledge of the world
into play, to appear without undue self-consciousness before his
stenographer, his bookkeeper, and his clerks. The ordeal was the more
severe because of his belief that they were conversant with the state of
his affairs. At least they knew enough to be sorry for him--of that he
was sure; though there was nothing on this particular morning to display
the sympathy, unless it was the stenographer's smile as he passed her in
the anteroom, and the three small yellow chrysanthemums she had placed
in a glass on his desk. In the nods of greeting between him and the men
there was, or there seemed to be, a studied effort to show nothing at
all.

Once safely in his own office, he shut the door with a sense of relief
in the seclusion. It crossed his mind that he should feel something of
the same sort when locked in the privacy of his cell after the hideous
publicity of the trial. From habit as well as from anxiety he went
straight to a mirror and surveyed himself again. Decidedly he had
changed since yesterday. It was not so much that he was older or more
care-worn--he was different. Perhaps he was ill. He felt well enough,
except for being tired, desperately tired; but that could be accounted
for by the way in which he had spent the night. He noticed chiefly the
ashy tint of his skin, the dullness of his eyes, and--notwithstanding
the fact that his clothes were of his usual fastidiousness--a curious
effect of being badly dressed more startling to him than pain. He was
careful to brush his beard and twist his long mustache into its usual
upward, French-looking curve, so as to regain as much as possible the
air of his old self, before seating himself at his desk to look over his
correspondence. There was a pile of letters, of which he read the
addresses slowly without opening any of them.

What was the use? He could do nothing. He had come to the end. He had
exhausted all the possibilities of the situation. Besides, his spirit
was broken. He could feel it. Something snapped last night within him
that would never be whole, never even be mended, again. It was not only
the material resources under his control that he had overtaxed, but the
spring of energy within himself, leaving him no more power of
resilience.

A