It was perhaps not strange that Barum was in absolute ignorance of the fact, since a knowledge of the vagaries of the stock market was decidedly outside of his world, but the truth was that he had begun to manage his fancied fortunes on a falling market when the bears were raging in Wall Street. While he slept that night a combination was being completed which was the next day to run down twenty-five per cent the conservative railroad stock in which West had felt it safe to put half his fairy gold. When Barum took up the paper at the restaurant on the third evening he had lost about $40,000,--a fact which could hardly have caused him more chagrin had he really possessed the money to lose. The game he was playing interested him like a new novel. His quick imagination had taken fire, and this defeat spurred him to a fresh endeavor. He felt himself in honor bound to regain what he had lost; and this evening went like the last, in complicated and decidedly amateurish efforts to bring his imaginary finances into a satisfactory condition. The writing of the play of which he was to read the skeleton to the manager in a fortnight advanced not at all. He took his pen to write, and laid it down to refresh his memory on the latest quotation on some stock; he tried to think of his plot, and found himself reflecting concerning debenture bonds and second mortgages, with the vaguest possible notion of what either might be. The strange possession which a vivid fancy may take of a lonely and imaginative mind is a phenomenon not unfamiliar to those who have studied the lives of men of fervid temperament; and the whim to which West now gave himself up was no more extravagant than many another which has had consequences far more serious. For days he went on, becoming more and more completely engrossed by the folly he was following. His writing-table was covered with papers upon which he had memoranda of stocks, of sales, of investments, calculations of commissions, and all the rest of it. He even thought of going down town to watch the bulletin boards at some broker's, but he would hardly have been the fanciful dreamer he was, had he not shrunk from actually coming in contact with men and the reality of the business at which he played. For a week this absurdity continued. Sometimes West gained a little in his visionary speculations, and this inspired him with new courage, although whether he won or lost he was still possessed with the fatal gambling mania. His work meanwhile was not advancing. It is true that he sat for hours at his table nominally at work upon his play, but he interrupted himself constantly to consider whether there were not some way of recovering the money he had lost.