“And now,” the voice was bitingly satirical, “finding that the Man of Destiny can’t always fight with confetti and the blowing of kisses, you grow faint-hearted.”

“Put it as you like, Mr. Burton....  All I know is that, after today, I should no longer feel proud....  I should feel like an accomplice in crime.”

Hamilton Burton laughed.  It was a short and not a pleasant laugh.

“Please yourself.  To me no man is indispensable.  Good-night.”

Mary did not wait for Paul.  As she drove up-town with the physician, she had in her ears the shouts of newsboys heralding the death of Jefferson Edwardes—­and other deaths.

When she was in her own bed they mercifully gave her something which smoothed her brain into the black velvet softness of sleep.  The future must tell whether her body and mind could ever be brought back to the harbor of health.

* * * * *

Hamilton Burton’s lights burned late that night in his office, and up to them many baleful glances turned from the sidewalks below.  The financier told himself that he was the same man that he had been, safeguarded by his star; but as he worked he found himself instinctively turning to the chair where Carl Bristoll should be and where now sat a more inept subordinate.  Each such moment brought its tiny stab at his pride and self-assurance, and the brain which he must concentrate kept straying to the disquieting vision of a grief-maddened girl leaning against the wall, with her fingers twitching in little groping gestures as her lips rained accusation.  Today he had made a panic, but between the opening and closing peals of tomorrow’s gong each hour must be filled with the most exact and brilliant maneuverings.

All day today he had borne down the market on a scale unprecedented.  All day tomorrow he must be in a position to reap the harvest he had sown—­else he might find himself the victim of a trap which he had prepared, at a mighty cost, for others.  No one knew so well as he how even his colossal strength had been strained with the titanic effort of pushing apart the masonry of the temple’s pillars.

He had no doubts of the morrow, but these troubling remembrances came blurringly across the crystal of his brain.

Abruptly he took up his telephone and rang his house number.  “Yamuro,” he said when he heard the sibilant, quaintly distorted voice of the Japanese from the other end, “ask Mr. Paul to wait for me there until I come in.”  Paul’s music should soothe him.

“’Scuse, please,” came the apologetic reply.  “Mr. Paul, she no here.  When she come, Yamuro tell.  Thanks.”

It was late when the financier left his car at his own door and demanded of Harrow, “Where is my brother?”

“In the music-room, I think, sir.”  Hamilton thought he detected in the butler’s voice a note of anxiety and for a moment he glanced with a keen scrutiny into the servitor’s eyes, and the eyes dropped under his gaze.