Street.” He wasn’t a broker; no, he was trying to raise money to hang on to some big properties that he had;[4] and the stocks seemed to be going at remarkable rates just now, the bottom dropping out of the market. If a certain stock of the Mercers’—they didn’t know the name—could be kept above twenty-seven he would pull through. Colonel Winter made no comment, but he remembered that when he had studied the morning’s stock-market pages for himself, he had noted “bad slump in the Southern steels,” and “Tidewater on the toboggan slide; off three to four points, declining from twenty-seven and a fraction to twenty-three.”

[3]

[4]

“Another victim of the Wall Street pirates,” was the colonel’s silent judgment on the tragedy. “Lucky for her his mother’s dead.”

The next morning he had returned and had gone to his young friend’s rooms.

The boy was still full of the horror of the day before. Mercer’s brother was in Cambridge, he said—arrived that morning from New York. “Endy is going to fetch him round to get him out of the reporters’ way sometime this evening; maybe there’s something I can do”—this in explanation of his declining to dine with the colonel. As the two entered the rooms, Winter was a little in advance, and caught the first glimpse of a man[5] sitting in a big mission arm-chair, his head sunk on his breast. So absorbed was this man in his own distempered musings that the new-comers’ approach did not arouse him. He sat with knitted brows and clenched hands, staring into vacancy; his rigid and pallid features set in a ghastly intensity of thought. There was suffering in the look; but there was more: the colonel, who had been living among the serpent passions of the Orient, knew deadly anger when he saw it; it was branded on the face before him. Involuntarily he fell back; he felt as if he had blundered in on a naked soul. Noiselessly he slipped out of the range of vision. He spoke loudly, halting to ask some question about the rooms; this made a moment’s pause.

[5]

It was sufficient; in the study they found a quiet, calm, although rather haggard-looking man, who greeted Winter’s companion courteously, with a Southern accent, and a very good manner. He was presented to the colonel as Mr. Mercer. He would have excused himself, professing that he was just going, but the colonel took the words out of his mouth: “Ralph, here, has a cigar for me—that is all I came for; see you at the Touraine, Ralph, to-morrow for luncheon, then.” He[6] did not see 

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