“The Western Trust Company announces that it cannot meet its obligations.”

The weakest barrier had fallen, and it was only the beginning.

CHAPTER XXIII

When Mary Burton presented herself in the anteroom of the suite whose ground-glass doors bore the legend “Edwardes and Edwardes,” and asked for the banker, a man with a pale and demoralized face gazed at her blankly.  Could any one seek to claim, except on most urgent business, one minute out of these crucially vital hours?  They were hours when the real target of the whole panic-making bombardment was striving to compress into each relentless instant a separate struggle for survival.

“I am Mary Burton,” she said simply; and the man stood dubiously shaking his head.  His nerve-racked condition could only realize the name Burton—­and in these offices it was not just now a favored name.

As he stood, barring the way to an inner room marked “private,” the door opened and Jefferson Edwardes came hurriedly out.  He looked as she had never seen him look before, for deep lines had seared themselves into his face, aging it distressingly, and the mouth was drawn as that of a man who has been called back from the margin of death.  But his eyes held an unwavering fire and his jaw was set in the pattern of battle.  Mary remembered a painting of a solitary and wounded artilleryman leaning against a shattered field gun amid the bodies of his fallen comrades.  The painter had put sternly into the face an expression of one who awaits death, but denies defeat.  Here, too, was such a face.  The man, hastening out, halted suddenly.  Then he stepped back into his own office, silently motioning her to follow.

“It has come,” he told her quietly.  “We should have expected it, yet we were taken by surprise.  Today tells a grim story.”

“What does it all mean?” she pleaded.  She stood close with her face almost as dead white as the ermine that fell softly about her shoulders.  “I read the papers—­and I came at once—­to be near you in these hours.  What does it mean?”

“I can’t explain now,” he answered in the quick utterance of one to whom time is invaluable.  “Now every minute may mean millions—­even human lives and deaths.  I told you that he must trample down the innocent and the ignorant to come within striking distance of me.  He is doing it.  The bottom has dropped out of everything—­pandemonium reigns.  Each minute is beggaring hundreds—­each half-hour is sending old houses to the wall and shattering public confidence.  By this afternoon the country will be in the lockjaw paralysis of panic—­unless we can stem the tide.  Will you wait here for me?  I must go to Malone.”

“And there is nothing I can do—­nothing?” Her voice was agonized and, with his hand on the knob, he abruptly wheeled and came back.  He caught her fiercely in his arms and held her so smotheringly to his breast that her breath came in gasps.  She clung to him spasmodically and the lips that met his were hot with a fever of fear and love.  “Nothing I can do,” she whispered, “though I am—­the Helen who brought on the war?”