The extent of the calamity left Mr. Letterblair white and incapacitated.  “I’ve seen bad things in my time; but nothing as bad as this.  Everybody we know will be hit, one way or another.  And what will be done about Mrs. Beaufort?  What can be done about her?  I pity Mrs. Manson Mingott as much as anybody:  coming at her age, there’s no knowing what effect this affair may have on her.  She always believed in Beaufort—­she made a friend of him!  And there’s the whole Dallas connection:  poor Mrs. Beaufort is related to every one of you.  Her only chance would be to leave her husband—­yet how can any one tell her so?  Her duty is at his side; and luckily she seems always to have been blind to his private weaknesses.”

There was a knock, and Mr. Letterblair turned his head sharply.  “What is it?  I can’t be disturbed.”

A clerk brought in a letter for Archer and withdrew.  Recognising his wife’s hand, the young man opened the envelope and read:  “Won’t you please come up town as early as you can?  Granny had a slight stroke last night.  In some mysterious way she found out before any one else this awful news about the bank.  Uncle Lovell is away shooting, and the idea of the disgrace has made poor Papa so nervous that he has a temperature and can’t leave his room.  Mamma needs you dreadfully, and I do hope you can get away at once and go straight to Granny’s.”

Archer handed the note to his senior partner, and a few minutes later was crawling northward in a crowded horse-car, which he exchanged at Fourteenth Street for one of the high staggering omnibuses of the Fifth Avenue line.  It was after twelve o’clock when this laborious vehicle dropped him at old Catherine’s.  The sitting-room window on the ground floor, where she usually throned, was tenanted by the inadequate figure of her daughter, Mrs. Welland, who signed a haggard welcome as she caught sight of Archer; and at the door he was met by May.  The hall wore the unnatural appearance peculiar to well-kept houses suddenly invaded by illness:  wraps and furs lay in heaps on the chairs, a doctor’s bag and overcoat were on the table, and beside them letters and cards had already piled up unheeded.

May looked pale but smiling:  Dr. Bencomb, who had just come for the second time, took a more hopeful view, and Mrs. Mingott’s dauntless determination to live and get well was already having an effect on her family.  May led Archer into the old lady’s sitting-room, where the sliding doors opening into the bedroom had been drawn shut, and the heavy yellow damask portieres dropped over them; and here Mrs. Welland communicated to him in horrified undertones the details of the catastrophe.  It appeared that the evening before something dreadful and mysterious had happened.  At about eight o’clock, just after Mrs. Mingott had finished the game of solitaire that she always played after dinner, the door-bell had rung, and a lady so thickly veiled that the servants did not immediately recognise her had asked to be received.