“Mr. Arnault,” said Stella, satirically, at last, “I will not tax your remarkable power for entertainment any longer.  I will now join papa, and retire.”

“Very well, Stella,” was the quiet reply; “but before we part I shall speak more to the point than if I had talked hours.  By this time another week the question must be decided.”

She bowed, and made no other answer.

“Stella,” said her father when they were alone and he had regarded for some moments her averted and half-sullen face, “what do you propose to do?” There was no answer.

After another pause he continued:  “In settling the question, represent your mother and myself by a cipher.  That is all we are, if the logic of your past action counts for anything.  Again I ask, What do you propose to do?  No matter how pretty and flattered a girl may be, she cannot alter gravitation.  There are other facts just as inexorable.  Shutting your eyes to them, or any other phase of folly, will not make the slightest difference.”

“I think it’s a horrid fact that I must marry a man that I don’t love.”

“That is not one of the facts at all.  Stock-gambler as I am, and in almost desperate straits, I require nothing of the kind.  Knowing you as I do, I advise you to accept Arnault at once; but I do not demand it; I do not even urge it.  If you loved me, if you would say, ’Give up this feverish life of risk; I will help you and suffer with you in your poverty; I will marry Graydon Muir and share his poverty,’ I would leave Wall Street at once and forever.  It’s a maelstrom in which men of my calibre and means are sucked down sooner or later.  The prospects now are that it will be sooner, unless I am helped through this crisis.”

“I believe you are mistaken about the Muirs being in financial danger.”

“I am not mistaken.  They may have to suspend daring the coming week.”

“I know that Graydon Muir has no suspicion of trouble.”

“He is but a clerk in his brother’s employ, and has just returned from a long absence.  Mr. Muir is one of the most reticent of men.  I have invested in the same dead stock that is swamping him, and so know whereof I speak.  Should this stock decline further—­should it even remain where it is much longer—­he can’t maintain himself.  I know, for I have taken pains to obtain information since I last went to town.”

“But if the stock rises,” she said, with the natural hope of a speculator’s daughter, “he is safe.”

“Yes, if.”

“How much time will you give me?” she asked, the lines of her face growing hard and resolute.