Other belated editors and reporters of the Chronicle staff drifted toward the elevator, until the gray-haired copy-reader was left alone in the city room as if marooned.  Writing as steadily as if he were a machine warranted to turn out so many words an hour, Seeley urged his pencil until the last page was finished.  Then he read and corrected the “story,” slipped it through a slit in a door marked “Sunday Editor,” and trudged out, while the tower clock was striking three.

Instead of seeking the chop-house, wherein the vivacious and tireless youth of the staff were wont to linger over supper, he turned into a side street and betook himself to a small cafe as yet unfrequented by the night-owls of journalism.  Seeley was a beaten man, and he preferred to nurse his wounds in a morbid isolation.  His gait and aspect were those of one who was stolidly struggling on the defensive, as if hostile circumstances had driven him into a corner where he was making his last stand.

Through the years of his indomitable youth as a reporter of rare ability and resourcefulness, he had never spared himself.  Burning the candle at both ends, with a vitality which had seemed inexhaustible, he had won step after step of promotion until, at forty, he was made managing editor of that huge and hard-driven organization, the New York Chronicle.  For five years of racking responsibility, Henry Harding Seeley had been able to maintain the pace demanded of his position.

Then came an error of judgment—­a midnight decision demanded of a fagged mind—­and his 0.K. was scrawled upon the first sheet of a story of embezzlement in Wall Street.  By an incredible blunder the name of the fugitive cashier was coupled with that of the wrong bank.  Publication of the Chronicle story started a terrific run on this innocent institution, which won its libel suit against the newspaper in the amount of one hundred thousand dollars.

The managing editor, two reporters, and the copy-reader who had handled the fatal manuscript, were swept out of the building by one cyclonic order from the owner thereof.  Henry Seeley accepted his indirect responsibility for the disaster in grim, manly fashion, and straightway sought another berth befitting his journalistic station.  But his one costly slip was more than a nine-days’ scandal along Park Row, and other canny proprietors were afraid that he might hit them in the very vital regions of their pockets.  Worse than this, his confidence in himself had suffered mortal damage.  The wear and tear of his earlier years had left him with little reserve power, and he went to pieces in the face of adverse fortune.

“Worked out at forty-five,” was the verdict of his friends, and they began to pity him.

The will to succeed had been broken, but Seeley might have rallied had not his wife died during the ebb-tide of his affairs.  She had walked hand in hand with him since his early twenties, her faith in him had been his mainstay, and his happiness in her complete and beautiful.  Bereft of her when he stood most in need of her, he seemed to have no more fight in him, and, drifting from one newspaper office to another, he finally eddied into his old “shop” as a drudging copy-reader and an object of sympathy to a younger generation.