“Yes,” he spoke eagerly, passionately, and she could feel the muscles in his tensed arms play like flexible steel as her hands dropped to rest inertly upon them.  “Yes, there is something you can do—­something you are doing!  You are giving me a strength beyond my own strength to fling myself on these wolves and beat them back.  You are giving me a battle-lust and a hope....  Now I must go.”

She released him and forced a smile for his departure, then sank into a chair—­his chair by a paper-littered desk—­and her eyes, very wide and fixed, gazed ahead—­at first unseeing.  Yet, after an interval they began to take in this and that detail of the place, where she had never been before.

This was his office, the workshop in which he carried on his affairs and the affairs of the concern which had its foundation in unshaken ideals and high honor.  In an intangible fashion its inanimate accessories reflected something of himself.  On one wall, from a generous spread of moose antlers, hung a rifle and a pair of restrung snowshoes:  reminders of the open woods he loved.  There were autographed portraits of many men whose names were names of achievement, and one, in a morocco frame surmounted by a gilt crown, attested the personal regard of a reigning monarch.  With clenched hands and a grim determination to divert her mind from the danger of madness, she went about the walls, reading those brief tributes to the man she loved.  Then she came back and picked up a gold frame which rested on his desk, where, as he worked, his eyes might never be long without its view—­and she was gazing into her own eyes.  She glanced out across the steep-walled, fog-reeking canons where Finance has its center and whence its myriad activities palpitate through arteries of masonry and nerves of wire.  He was out there somewhere, in the maw of that incalculably destructive machine, fighting its determination to grind him between its wheels and cogs and teeth.  Mary Burton shuddered and tried by the pressure of her fingers to still the violent throbbing of her temples.

Then her eyes began absently studying the inscriptions on the windows of the next building, beyond an intervening court, and she smothered an impulse to scream as a sign across several broad panes flared at her in goldleaf.

“Hamilton Montagu Burton.”  A bitter fascination held her gaze there.  She saw offices teeming with the fevered activity of a beehive—­and another window showed a room where the electric lamps shone on emptiness.  After she had watched it for a time a solitary figure came into view and stood by the ledge looking out.  It was her brother, and though, through the gray fog, he was silhouetted there against the light at his back, something in the posture revealed his mood of Napoleonic implacability.  It was as though he were, from an eminence, actually viewing the battle whose secret springs his fingers controlled, and as though he were well pleased.