awoke
oppressed and sick at heart with gloom--and then dozed at intervals
through fantastic new ordeals of anguish and shame and fear, till it was
decently possible to get up.

Then, indeed, the big cold sponge on his head and spine scattered these
foolish troubles like chaff, and restored to him his citizenship among
the realities. He dressed with returning equanimity, and was almost
cheerful by the time he thrust his razor into the hot water. Yet
increasingly he was conscious of the wear and strain of it all, and
increasingly the date, September twelfth, loomed before him with a
portentous individuality of its own.

This day grew to mean so much more to him than had all the other days
of the dead years together that he woke in the darkness of its opening
hours, and did not get satisfactorily to sleep again. His vigil,
however, was for the once free from grief. He drowsily awaited the
morning in vague mental comfort; he had recurring haphazard indolent
glimpses of a protecting fact standing guard just outside the portals
of consciousness--the fact that the great day was here. He rose early,
breakfasted well, and walked by the Embankment to the City, where at
ten he had a few words with Semple, and afterward caused himself to be
denied to ordinary callers. He paced up and down the Board Room for the
better part of the ensuing two hours, luxuriating in the general sense
of satisfaction in the proximity of the climax, rather than pretending
to himself that he was thinking out its details. He had provided in his
plans of the day for a visit from Messrs. Rostocker and Aronson, which
should constitute the dramatic finale of the "corner," and he looked
forward to this meeting with a certain eagerness of expectation. Yet
even here he thought broadly of the scene as a whole, and asked himself
no questions about words and phrases. It seemed to be taken for granted
in his mind that the scene itself would be theatrically impressive, even
spectacular.

In the event, this long-awaited culmination proved to be disappointingly
flat and commonplace. It was over before Thorpe had said any
considerable proportion of the things he saw afterward that he had
intended to say. The two men came as he had expected they would--and
they bought their way out of the tragic "corner" at precisely the price
he had nominated in his mind. But hardly anything else went as he had
dimly prefigured it.

Mr. Rostocker was a yellow-haired man, and Mr. Ar