He returned to his attic and figured it out. He was absolutely and hopelessly ruined. He had not only lost every dollar of his imaginary fortune, but he was, on paper, some seven or eight hundred dollars in debt to his brokers for commissions. He was so overwhelmed by this catastrophe that he sat brooding over it in the darkness of the February twilight and gathering night, until it was far past the hour when he usually took his apology for a dinner. He was not without a sense of humor sufficiently vivid to make him laugh at himself, and mentally mock at the vexation which the result of his airy speculations caused him; but this did not prevent his being vexed, or take his thoughts from laborious calculations how a different result might have been reached. He went off to dinner at last with a sober and abstracted mien, ordering a repast even more economical than usual, as befitted one who had just lost his whole fortune in ill-starred speculation. It was his custom to time his visit to the restaurant so as to dine before the crowd of customers came for their evening meal. To-night, however, he was behind them. The place was no fuller than he usually found it, but it bore signs of the recent crush. The cloth of the table was crumpled and soiled, the glass in which the inevitable ice-water was poured was yet warm from being washed, while the evening paper the waiter gave him was adorned with an irregular stain of coffee. In the midst of the brown blotch of this stain was a patch undiscolored; and by one of those odd and improbable coincidences of which life is full, in the midst of this spot of dingy white Barum West once more caught sight of his own name. The whimsical fate which had started the fantastic train of thought in his mind ten days before now finished its work by a paragraph stating that the will by which $200,000 had been bequeathed to Barum West by Richard Granger, of Chicago, was now found to antedate a second testament by which the money was left to Harvard College. Barum West went home with the light step of a boy. A great responsibility seemed suddenly lifted from his shoulders. The capricious fancy which had insisted that he should be depressed because he had lost an imaginary fortune had apparently been willing to accept the fact that even in hypothesis the possession of the money had been a mistake, and the unlucky speculator was formally acquitted at the bar of his inner consciousness. He lit his lamp and his pipe, seated himself in his chintz-covered rocking-chair, with his heels on the top of the coal stove, and ruminated. He reflected upon the fact that it was only five days before he was to meet the manager, and nothing was done in the way of a play which he could for an instant regard as at all satisfactory. "Instead of writing an extravaganza," he thought, with mingled amusement and self-reproach, "I have been living one."