Financially he was little injured; the blow went deeper. He was stripped of all interest in Consolidated. Everything to which he had given his energy and thought was lifted out of his grasp. He was left with nothing. To all that body of nearly sixteen thousand investors whose confidence had so inflated his pride--he was now less than nothing. Dorothy's warning recurred to him, wrenched a wondering groan from his spirit. How those clear, cool eyes of her had pierced to the rotten heart of Macgowan! If he had only heeded it--if he had only received it sooner! Armstrong dropped his face in his hands, fighting desperately if unavailingly for a foothold on sanity, for a clear brain. He could find no outstanding point, nothing on which to build; tumult and chaos still engulfed him, and the will to do was dead. He could think only of Lawrence Macgowan, and his soul was plunged into a frightful despair. Slowly he realized what he had lost; slowly he came to a comprehension of how this astounding treachery had won the fight against him. Now that everything was finished, he could by degrees perceive what a frightful act of folly he had that morning committed. With a perfectly clean conscience, with nothing whatever to fear--why, why had he not made some semblance of a fight? His act in signing those papers had been the act of a coward, a fool! He shivered at thought of himself that morning, shivered at the remembrance of what he had passed through. Macgowan, with superb craft and diabolical certainty, had counted on that very thing, of course; had delivered blow upon blow, each following close upon the quivering impact of the other; had in fact brought his whole campaign of treachery to a culmination, had won everything, almost before Armstrong so much as knew himself in danger. Oh, clever, infernally clever, Macgowan! How cunningly he had planned, knowing that Armstrong would be stunned, rendered incapable of fighting, at a loss to do anything! It was the voting trust, of course, which had served as the final weapon-- Armstrong started suddenly. How far back did this duplicity extend? How long had Macgowan been concerting his treachery around his control of the voting trust? This thought electrified him, sent his brain reaching out at last. The terrible conviction grew upon him that he had been duped from the start, tricked and played as a pawn from the very outset of his career in New York! All this while, he had been building up a business system in order that Macgowan, sitting back and watching, might grab it when the time came. And the time had come. Consolidated had slipped from his grasp. Macgowan had set that brain of his to making his own fortune.