And always to the sunken-eyed anxiety of his mother, and the puffy-eyed misgivings of his father and the quaking terror of his brother, he gave back laughing assurances of his unquenchable power. To them he treated as technicalities, which he would casually brush aside. Federal prosecutions and Congressional investigations and the solid phalanx of financial interests that constantly drew their strangling cordons around him. He never admitted to others or to himself as a possibility the reckoning which was sure beyond question. Yet except for a detail of months--or weeks--he was as irremediably ruined as though already the tape of the stock-ticker had spelled out its unemotional announcement, "Hamilton Burton cannot meet his obligations." He had been wounded through the one vulnerable joint of his armor: his great self-pride and unquestioning assurance were struck to the quick of the heart. His day was done. Since he had lost in dozens and scores of millions and could return to his preeminence only by mighty leaps, he plunged again in dozens and scores of millions, as befitted a mighty gambler. And in scores he lost and in scores again he plunged--to his ruinous and total undoing. * * * * * As the Burton fortunes were dwindling, Loraine Haswell, who had come now from the Riviera to Paris, found her state of mind reaching an anxiety that threatened first her composure, then almost her reason. She knew of her husband's ruin, and had written him a letter of condolence rather more human than any of her other communications to him had been of late. But that the shattering of such a moderate financier as Len Haswell should foreshadow the total ruin of a money czar like Hamilton Burton and impoverish his parasite brother, was an idea too colossal to grasp in its entirety. Yet in the news from America it slowly dawned. In the Paris edition of the _Herald_ it was convincingly chronicled, and the beautiful dark-haired woman who had thrown away her husband began to see that she had no reserve upon which to fall back. Had Len's modest fortune survived that tempest, it would have been easy to put back into port. A little contrition, a confession that she had tried living without him and found it impossible, would have won his forgiveness, because his heart had been too sore to calculate. But now Len was bankrupt and Paul would be likewise. In these days Carlos de Metuan was no longer a speaker of veiled phrases. He was playing the role of the generous Platonic friend, watching her moods and seeking to comfort her. There was no strain of iron in this woman's soul, and that suited his purpose. Just now he would gain more by merely standing by. Her increasing alarm would one day turn to panic and she would lose her head. For that day he could afford to wait.