e Trust
stock, has taken advantage of the latter's preoccupation with Miss
Ellersly to boom the price of the stock. With ruin staring him in the
face, Blacklock takes energetic measures to save himself.

He sees Anita, tells her the situation and frees her, but she refuses
to accept her release when she hears of Langdon's duplicity.

With the aid of money loaned to him by a gambler friend, he succeeds
the next day, by means of large purchases of Textile Trust, in
postponing the catastrophe.

Calling at the house of the Ellerslys, he has a violent scene with
Mrs. Ellersly, who attempts to break the engagement between him and
Anita, but it ends in his taking her with him from the house.

They go to the house of Blacklock's partner, Joseph Ball, where they
are married, after which Blacklock takes his wife to his own
apartments, despite her protest that she wishes to go to her uncle's.

Anita plainly shows her aversion to her husband, though he treats her
with the greatest delicacy and consideration.

After some days the young wife receives a call from her parents, who
seek to persuade her to leave Blacklock, telling her that they have
private information that he will soon be a bankrupt. Anita refuses to
go unless they will return to her husband all the money they have
obtained from him.

All this she frankly tells Blacklock, who scoffs at the idea that he
is in sore straits financially, though in his secret heart he knows
that his position is indeed precarious.

In his extremity he goes to Roebuck, to ascertain, if he can, if he
too is in the plot to ruin him.

THE DELUGE

By DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS

[FOR SYNOPSIS OF PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS SEE PRECEDING PAGE]

XV--(_Continued_).

When Roebuck lived near Chicago, he had a huge house, a sort of crude
palace such as so many of our millionaires built for themselves in the
first excitement of their new wealth--a house with porches and
balconies and towers and minarets and all sorts of gingerbread effects
to compel the eye of the passer-by. But when he became enormously
rich, so rich that his name was one of the synonyms for wealth, so
rich that people said "rich as Roebuck" where they used to say "rich
as Croesus," he cut away every kind of ostentation, and avoided
attention more eagerly than he had once sought it. He took advantage
of his having to remove to New York, where his vast interests
centered; he bought a small and commonplace and, for a rich man