doesn’t do his duty—­which you say he does—­oh, dear; I expect that Scott and Kathleen and I will have to take in boarders this winter; but if nobody has any money, nobody can pay board, so everybody will be ruined and I don’t very much care, for I could teach school, only who is to pay my salary if there’s no money to pay it with?  Oh, dear! what nonsense I am writing—­only to keep on writing, because it seems to bring you a little nearer—­my own—­my Duane—­my comrade—­the same, same little boy who ran away from his nurse and came into our garden to fight my brother and—­fall in love with his sister!  Oh, Fate!  Oh, Destiny!  Oh, Duane Mallett!

    “Here is a curious phenomenon.  Listen: 

“Away from you I have a woman’s courage to tell you how I long for you, how my heart and my arms ache for you.  But when I am with you I’m less of a woman and more of a girl—­a girl not yet accustomed to some things—­always guarded, always a little reticent, always instinctively recoiling from the contact I really like, always a little on the defensive against your lips, in spite of myself—­against your arms—­where, somehow, I cannot seem to stay long at a time—­will not endure it—­cannot, somehow.

    “Yet, here, away from you, I so long for your embrace, and cannot
    imagine it too long, too close, too tender to satisfy my need of
    you.

“And this is my second letter to you within the hour—­one hour after
your departure.

“Oh, Duane, I do truly miss you so!  I go about humming that air you
found so quaint: 

“’Lisetto quittee la plaine,
Moi perdi bonheur a moi,
Yeux a moi semblent fontaine,
Depuis moi pas mire toi,’

and there’s a tear in every note of it, and I’m the most lonely
girl on the face of the earth to-day.

“GERALDINE QUI PLEURE.”

“P.S.—­Voici votre pipe, Monsieur!”

CHAPTER XIV

THE PROPHETS

August in town found an unusual number of New York men at the clubs, at the restaurants, at the summer theatres.  Men who very seldom shoved their noses inside the metropolitan oven during the summer baking were now to be met everywhere and anywhere within the financial district and without.  The sky-perched and magnificent down-town “clubs” were full of men who under normal circumstances would have remained at Newport, Lenox, Bar Harbor, or who at least would have spent the greater portion of the summer on their yachts or their Long Island estates.

And in every man’s hand or pocket was a newspaper.

They were scarcely worth reading for mere pleasure, these New York newspapers; indeed, there was scarcely anything in them to read except a daily record of the steady decline in securities of every description; paragraphs noting the passing of dividends; columns setting forth minutely the opinions of very wealthy men concerning the business outlook; chronicles in detail of suits brought against railroads and against great industrial corporations; accounts of inquiries by State and by Federal authorities into combinations resulting in an alleged violation of various laws.