Hardly had he begun an attempted explanation of the instrument, and just as he realized the impossibility of teaching her in several minutes all the intricacies of the stock market institution, when his eyes noted on the tape that Frisco Consolidated was down twenty points—a thing unprecedented in that little Iowa railroad which R.H.M. had financed and builded and to the day of his death maintained proudly as so legitimate a creation, that, though half the banks and all of Wall Street crashed, it would weather any storm. The Queen viewed with alarm the alarm that grew on Francis’ face. “It is magic—like my Mirror of the World?” she half-queried, half-stated. Francis nodded. “It tells you secrets, I know,” she continued. “Like my golden bowl, it brings all the world, here within this very room, to you. It brings you trouble. That is very plain. But what trouble can this world bring you, who are one of its great kings?” He opened his mouth to reply to her last question, halted, and said nothing, realizing the impossibility of conveying comprehension to her, the while, under his eyelids, or at the foreground of his brain, burned pictures of great railroad and steamship lines, of teeming terminals and noisy docks; of miners toiling in Alaska, in Montana, in Death Valley; of bridled rivers, and harnessed waterfalls, and of power-lines stilting across lowlands and swamps and marshes on two-hundred-foot towers; and of all the mechanics and economics and finances of the twentieth century machine-civilization. “It brings you trouble,” she repeated. “And, alas! I cannot help you. My golden bowl is no more. Never again shall I see the world in it. I am no longer a ruler of the future. I am a woman merely, and helpless in this strange, colossal world to which you have brought me. I am a woman merely, and your wife, Francis, your proud wife.” Almost did he love her, as, dropping the tape, he pressed her closely for a moment ere going over to the battery of telephones. She is delightful, was his thought. There is neither guile nor malice in her, only woman, all woman, lovely and lovable——alas, that Leoncia should ever and always arise in my thought between her whom I have and herself whom I shall never have! “More magic,” the Queen murmured, as Francis, getting Bascom’s office, said: “Mr. Bascom will undoubtedly arrive back in half an hour. This is Morgan talking——Francis Morgan. Mr. Bascom left for his office not five minutes ago. When he arrives, tell him that I have started for his office and shall not be more than five minutes behind him. This is important. Tell him I am on the way. Thank you. Good bye.” Very naturally, with all the wonders of the great house yet to be shown her, the Queen betrayed her disappointment when Francis told her he must immediately depart for a place called Wall Street. “What is it,” she asked, with a pout of displeasure, “that drags you away from me like a slave?”