For just a moment the situation had a precarious seeming for the reviled young master of finance, and Paul’s delicate face blanched a little.  Hamilton Burton regarded himself as the brother of monarchs and it devolves upon the Crown to face the envious animosity of groundlings.

He leaned forward and said quietly to the chauffeur, “Swing around into the open and drive on.”

But recognition of the often-photographed face was not confined to the assailants and instantly the focused humanity was being broken into scattering factors by police officers who had not hitherto been visible.  The capitalist saw two struggling offenders being roughly hustled away in the custody of uniformed captors and a patrolman swung to the running board of the car and remained there as it rounded the square, with his loosened club swinging ready for service in his right hand.

“You weren’t struck, were you, Mr. Burton?” he asked in the tone of solicitude to which Hamilton had grown accustomed, and which he accepted as a part of his right.

He smiled.  “No harm done but a broken glass—­and the less noise made about the incident the better I’ll be pleased.”

The car had now reached the south end of the area, where the bronze Washington stands with his hand raised as if in dignified rebuke for the noisy demonstrations he so often looks down upon, and where the Marquis de Lafayette turns his back on the square and gazes at the moving-picture posters of Fourteenth street.

For a minute or two the younger brother sat in nervous silence, and, when he spoke, he put his question in a voice of anxious concern.  “Aren’t you alarmed, Hamilton?”

“Alarmed?” The other raised his brows and smiled.  His face was placid.  “Don’t you remember, Paul, what Charles Fox once had to say on the subject?  At least he got the credit for saying it, which comes to the same thing.  ’A man of power has no other such luxury as being mobbed in his carriage.’”

“I wasn’t thinking of just that.  I know you aren’t afraid of any physical attack.  I was wondering what it all prophesies.  We musicians can feel the crescendo coming from the first mounting bars.  Everywhere there is a spirit of unrest; of revolution.  Doesn’t it mean a crash—­a panic?”

Again the man whose brain had turned the base metal of poverty into the gold of Croesus smiled.

“I’m not a betting man, Paul, but I’d be willing to lay a moderate wager that within the next year or two we shall see a panic that will leave many scars and not a few wrecks.”

“And that conviction doesn’t alarm you?” The musician let his features mirror his nervous surprise.  If the principal had no fear, at least the dependent was in terror.

The amusement left Hamilton Burton’s eyes and into them came the harder gleam.  “Paul, you know as little about finance as I know about music.  I’ve done what I’ve done by following one law:  the leashing of forces.  Electricity is force, but electricity unharnessed is lightning which devastates.  Fire, uncontrolled, ravages, but, held in check, makes power.  Every force in a man’s nature that is not curbed becomes a weakness.  The only difference between success and failure is the twist given to the initial impulse.  Every danger and peril, if foreseen and met, becomes opportunity.”