Edith planned neatly.  She fought hard, every other evening, with her father, and kept her bed betweentimes to let him see what his violence had done to her.  Then, when the mere sight of her set him to breathing fast, she said pitiably that she might bear her trouble better if she went away; it was impossible to be in the same town with Lamhorn and not think always of him.  Perhaps in New York she might forget a little.  She had written to a school friend, established quietly with an aunt in apartments—­and a month or so of theaters and restaurants might bring peace.  Sheridan shouted with relief; he gave her a copious cheque, and she left upon a Monday morning wearing violets with her mourning and having kissed everybody good-by except Sibyl and Bibbs.  She might have kissed Bibbs, but he failed to realize that the day of her departure had arrived, and was surprised, on returning from his zinc-eater, that evening, to find her gone.  “I suppose they’ll be maried there,” he said, casually.

Sheridan, seated, warming his stockinged feet at the fire, jumped up, fuming.  “Either you go out o’ here, or I will, Bibbs!” he snorted.  “I don’t want to be in the same room with the particular kind of idiot you are!  She’s through with that riff-raff; all she needed was to be kept away from him a few weeks, and I kept her away, and it did the business.  For Heaven’s sake, go on out o’ here!”

Bibbs obeyed the gesture of a hand still bandaged.  And the black silk sling was still round Sheridan’s neck, but no word of Gurney’s and no excruciating twinge of pain could keep Sheridan’s hand in the sling.  The wounds, slight enough originally, had become infected the first time he had dislodged the bandages, and healing was long delayed.  Sheridan had the habit of gesture; he could not “take time to remember,” he said, that he must be careful, and he had also a curious indignation with his hurt; he refused to pay it the compliment of admitting its existence.

The Saturday following Edith’s departure Gurney came to the Sheridan Building to dress the wounds and to have a talk with Sheridan which the doctor felt had become necessary.  But he was a little before the appointed time and was obliged to wait a few minutes in an anteroom —­there was a directors’ meeting of some sort in Sheridan’s office.  The door was slightly ajar, leaking cigar-smoke and oratory, the latter all Sheridan’s, and Gurney listened.

“No, sir; no, sir; no, sir!” he heard the big voice rumbling, and then, breaking into thunder, “I tell you no!  Some o’ you men make me sick!  You’d lose your confidence in Almighty God if a doodle-bug flipped his hind leg at you!  You say money’s tight all over the country.  Well, what if it is?  There’s no reason for it to be tight, and it’s not goin’ to keep our money tight!  You’re always runnin’ to the woodshed to hide your nickels in a crack because some fool newspaper says the market’s