“You hold among the securities of your two banks just the margin of Coal and Ore which I need for complete safety.  Turn your proxies over to me tonight and tomorrow will pass quietly.  I will support every market depression caused by Malone’s illness.  There will be no panic.  Fail to do that and ten minutes after the gong sounds on the floor, I shall be ripping the entrails out of the Street!  Full-page advertisements in every paper in town will feed the general uneasiness into an orgy of terror.  Frightened mobs will clamor about the doors of your banks.  Other things will happen which it is not now necessary to enumerate.  It will be the blackest day in Exchange history and one that will reflect itself in all the bourses of Europe.”

After eleven o’clock, when Mary Burton and Jefferson Edwardes returned from the theater, the girl caught a glimpse of a strange picture as she paused in the hall.

Six silent men stood or sat about the brightly lighted library with blue wreaths of cigar smoke drifting upward above them.  It was plain that this silence had fallen upon them only as they heard the door slam, and that, like their attitudes, it was strained and artificial.

Hamilton Burton stood before the hearth with his face set as unyielding and immobile as chiseled granite.  Ruferton eyed the two bankers with a sidewise stare between drooping lids, and Hendricks, at the window, presented to view only his back.  But the features of the bankers themselves were haggard and miserable; like the faces of men making a last desperate stand, yet fronting inevitable defeat.  Such faces one might imagine in a nightmare, staring on a passerby and failing to see him, from a rack of torture.

Mary Burton shuddered a little, though she did not know why, and the lips of Jefferson Edwardes compressed themselves as he followed her to the music-room on the second floor.  He had caught the tigerish cruelty and power-lust in the eyes of Mary’s brother, and he knew that for their satisfaction someone must pay very dear.

Paul sat at the piano as they entered the music-room and the emotions which he expressed upon the keys were emotions of deep unrest.  They ran in strains of folklore plaintiveness and rhythmic sobs of wailing cadences.  When Mary spoke the musician turned with a start.  He had not heard their entrance.

“I didn’t know we should find you here, Paul.”

He nodded as he rose from the instrument.  “Hamilton asked me to wait,” he explained.  “He’s having some tremendously important conference—­and after a trying fight he always likes me to play for him.”

The three sat for a time unaccustomedly silent.  Mary could not forget the impression of those conquered faces, and Edwardes, with the same thought, forebore from comment.  Within a half-hour Hamilton himself joined them.  His eyes were glowing beacons of triumph and his lips wore a smile of victory.

“Tonight I have met and defeated Malone’s attempt to crush me,” he announced with a half-savage elation.  “Tomorrow the financial world will recognize in me the actual and unchallenged head of Coal and Ore.”  Then, turning to Jefferson, he added:  “You know what that signifies, Edwardes.”