It was not till the death of the latter, some seven years ago, that Guion, obliged to pause, was able to take cognizance of the degree to which he had imperiled himself in the years of effort to maintain their way of life.  It could not be said that at the time he regretted what he had done, but he allowed it to frighten him into some ineffectual economies.  He exchanged the cottage at Newport for one at Lenox, and, giving up the house in Boston, withdrew to Tory Hill.  Ceasing himself to go into society, he sent his daughter abroad for a large portion of her time, either in the care of Madame de Melcourt or, in London, under the wing of some of the American ladies prominent in English life.

Having taken these steps, with no small pride in his capacity for sacrifice, Guion set himself seriously to reconstruct his own fortune and to repair the inroads he had made on those in his trust.  It was a matter in which he had but few misgivings as to his capacity.  The making of money, he often said, was an easy thing, as could be proved by the intellectual grade of the men who made it.  One had only to look about one to see that they were men in whom the average of ability was by no means high, men who achieved their successes largely by a kind of rule of thumb.  They got the knack of investment—­and they invested.  He preferred the word investment to another which might have challenged comment.  They bought in a low market and sold in a high one—­and the trick was done.  Some instinct—­a flair, he called it—­was required in order to recognize, more or less at sight, those properties which would quickly and surely appreciate in value; and he believed he possessed it.  Given the control of a few thousands as a point of departure, and the financial ebb and flow, a man must be a born fool, he said, not to be able to make a reasonable fortune with reasonable speed.

Within the office of Guion, Maxwell & Guion circumstances favored the accession to power of the younger partner, who had hitherto played an acquiescent rather than an active part.  Mr. Maxwell was old and ailing, though neither so ailing nor so old as to be blind to the need of new blood, new money, and new influence in the fine old firm.  His weakness was that he hated beginning all over again with new men; so that when Smith and Jones were proposed as possible partners he easily admitted whatever objections Guion raised to them, and the matter was postponed.  It was postponed again.  It slipped into a chronic condition of postponement; and Mr. Maxwell died.

The situation calling then for adroitness on Guion’s part, the fact that he was able to meet it to the satisfaction of all the parties concerned, increased his confidence in his own astuteness.  True, it required some manipulation, some throwing of dust into people’s eyes, some making of explanations to one person that could not be reconciled with those made to another; but here again the circumstances