What the dear woman never knew, and it was just as well that she did not, were the special happenings which ended in the overwhelming catastrophe.

It really began with a tea basket, holding enough for two, which was opened one lovely afternoon under the big willows skirting that little strip of land bordering the backwater at Cookham-on-Thames.  My lady at the time was wearing a wide leghorn hat with blue ribbons that matched her eyes and set off the roses in her fair English cheeks.  Her companion was in white flannels—­a muscular, well-set-up young man of thirty, fifteen years younger than her husband and with twice his charm—­one of those delightful companions who possess the rare quality of making an hour seem but five minutes.  A gay party had dropped down the river in her father’s launch, which had been tied up at Ferry Inn, and Dalton had insisted on taking my lady for just a half-hour’s poling in a punt, Felix and the others preferring to take their tea at the Inn—­plans readily agreed to and carried out, except that the half-hour prolonged itself into two whole ones.

Then there had come a week-end at Glenmore Castle and a garden party outside London, and then five-o’clock teas at half a dozen private houses, including one or two meetings a trifle more secluded.  And all quite as it should be, for a most desirable and valuable guest was this same Mr. Guy Dalton, a man received everywhere with open arms, as “one of the rising men of the time, my dear sir,” a financier of distinction, indeed, and a promoter of such skill that he had only to issue a prospectus, or wink knowingly on the street, or take you aside at the club and whisper confidentially to you, when everything he had issued, winked at, or whispered about would go up with a rush, and countless men and women—­a goodly number were women—­would be hundreds, nay, thousands of pounds the richer before the week was out.

That his own buoyant imagination, as well as that of those who followed his lead, should have been stretched to the utmost was quite within the possibilities when one recollects that the basis of all this wealth was crude rubber, a substance of pronounced elasticity.  This, too, accounts for the vim and suddenness of the final recoil attending the final collapse—­a recoil which smashed everything and everybody within its reach.

There were “words,” of course, between Dalton and some of his victims.  There always are “words” when the ball bounces back and you catch it full in the eye.  And for salves and soothing plasters there were the customary explanations regarding the state of the market, the tightness of money, the non-arrival of important details, the delaying of despatches owing to a break in the cable, together with offers of heavy discounts, and increased allotments of stock for renewed subscriptions.  But the end came, just as it always does.

And so did the aftermath, as was shown by the advertisements in the auction columns of the daily papers and the motley mob of hungry, perspiring dealers, pawing over the household gods; and, more disastrous still, because of its rarity, Felix’s brave fight to save his father’s name, the whole struggle ending in his own ruin.