of the evening service. It was all so one-sided,
obsessed by the one idea of labor, lacking in the simplest direction
toward any comprehension of the enjoyment of life.

The crisis he had reached, the threatened descent from the sublime to
the ridiculous, brought with it that contrition which in men is a
superstitious seeking for the secret of their own failures in some
transgressed moral law. His own life all at once seemed cruelly selfish
and gluttonous before this bleak view of the groping world and,
profoundly stirred to self-analysis, he said to himself:

"After all--why am I here--to try and change all this a little for the
better or to pass on and out without significance?" And at the thought
that year in and year out these hundreds would go on, doomed to this
stagnation, there woke in him a horror, a horror of what it must mean to
fall back and slip beneath the surface of society.

He arrived in New York at three in the morning, after an interminable
ride in the jolting, wheezing train, fervently awake in the dim and
draughty smoking-car where strange human beings huddled over a greasy
pack of cards or slept in drunken slumber. And all during the lagging
return one thought kept beating against his brain:

"Why didn't I close up yesterday--yesterday I could have made--" He
closed his eyes, dizzy with the thought of what he could have netted
yesterday. He said to himself that he would wind up everything in the
morning. And there would still be a profit, there was still time ...
knowing in his heart that disaster had already laid its clutching hand
upon his arm. The city was quiet with an unearthly, brooding quiet as he
reached the Court, where one light still shone in the window of a
returned reveler. Marsh and DeLancy came hurriedly out at the sound of
his entrance.

"What's wrong?" he cried at the sight of Fred's drawn face.

"Everything. The city's full of it," said Marsh. "It leaked out this
afternoon, or rather the Gunther crowd let it leak out. Pittsburgh & New
Orleans will declare an additional quarterly dividend to-morrow."

"It's the end of us," said Fred. "The stock will go kiting up."

"We've got to cover," said Bojo.

"In a crazy market? If we can!"

"It may not be true."

"I've got it as direct as I could get it," said Marsh, shaking his head.

"Suppose there is a corner and we have to settle around 100 or 150?"
said DeLancy, staring nervously away.

There was no need for Bojo to ask h