still almost one hundred
and sixty thousand dollars. Why should he not deduct his own losses,
amounting to over seventy thousand dollars incurred in the service of a
campaign which had netted millions?

His conscience, tortured by the tragic memory of Forshay and the feeling
of the spreading circles of panic and losses which had started from his
unwitting agency, had finally recoiled before the thought of making
profit of the desolation of others. But if he renounced the gain, was
there any reason why he should suffer loss; why Drake should not
reimburse him as he had reimbursed others? To accept this view meant
that he would still remain in possession of upwards of eighty-five
thousand dollars, producing a tidy income, able to hold up his own in
the society to which he had grown accustomed. To renounce the payment of
his losses meant not simply a blow to his pride in the acknowledgment
that in the first six months he had already lost two-thirds of what his
father had given him, but that his whole scheme of living would have to
be changed, while marriage with Doris became an impossibility.

Beyond the first letter he had written her in the first tragic reaction
on his return from the office, he had sent Doris no further word. What
he had to say was yet too undefined to express on paper. Too much
depended on her attitude when they met at last face to face. Her
letters, full of anxiety and demand for information, remained
unanswered. One afternoon on returning after a day's tramp on the East
Side, he found a telegram, which had been waiting hours.

Return this afternoon four-thirty most anxious meet me
station.

DORIS.

It was then almost six. Without waiting to telephone explanations he
jumped in a taxi and shot off uptown. At the Drakes' he sent up his name
by Thompson, learning with a sudden tightening of the heart that Drake
himself was home. He went into the quiet reception room, nervously
excited by the approaching crisis, resolved now that it was up, to push
it to its ultimate conclusion. As he whipped back and forth, fingering
impatiently the shining green leaves of the waxed rubber plant, all at
once, to his amazement, Patsie stood before him.

"You here?" he said, stopping short.

She nodded, red in her cheeks, looking quickly at him and away.

"Doris is changing her dress; she'll be down right away. Didn't you get
the telegram?"

"I'm sorry-- I was out all day."

He stopped and she was