Harold Vreeland, with a pale face, sat on watch in his own room, his eyes glued upon the features of Mary Kelly as she recorded each momentous message from the strange woman at the Circassia who was now playing a gigantic game. An influx of bank and stock private confidential messengers, the evening conferences with Elaine Willoughby, and a breathless study of check book stubs “delivery and statements,” pressed him, while the pale-faced woman near him, cut out every lurid article of the daily journals describing the cyclonic rise and fall of the price of Sugar Certificates now heaving in a storm of unrest as sweeping as the Bay of Fundy’s tides. Below, in the noisy street, the newsboys bawled “extras,” while all the hotels, clubs and money marts were thronged with excited babblers. For three days, the corridors of the New York Stock Exchange were crowded with men whose vulpine faces were either hardened by despair, or else excitedly gleaming with the flush of victory. Broad and Wall streets were filled with excited crowds, while in the galleries, the clients, reporters and money-betting public watched the members on the floor struggling over Sugar. From ten to three daily the heat of battle was on, and, even after dark the duels of winner and loser were transferred “uptown.” In the Consolidated Petroleum and Stock Exchange a mad riot reigned, intensified by the vociferous dealings of the crowding “curb-stone” brokers. With a cowardice newly born of his mean treason, Harold Vreeland trembled as he crept out of the “Elmleaf,” during the three days to steal into a decorous-looking private residence near, where from ten to three with her eyes glittering with a fierce excitement, Alida Hathorn sat in a rear parlor, guarded by the all too accommodating Mrs. Volney McMorris cozily ensconced upstairs. But the schemer well knew that Hathorn was a leading figure in the downtown mêlée where “Sugar” had been steadily hammered down from “seventy” to “fifty” under tremendous sales. Every conceivable disaster had been suddenly “materialized” around the standard of the hitherto strongly upheld monopoly. It was on Friday, at one o’clock, that Vreeland, awestruck, added up his scheduled statement of sales, on ten-day delivery terms. It amounted to nearly twenty thousand shares, and the total of the transactions astounded him. He had just stolen in to report the last order to Alida Hathorn, a sale of a thousand shares, and she had gleefully whispered, “You have already handled twenty, but I have turned forty thousand shares, and I’ve now reached my limit. If it goes down ten dollars more, we can cover all our contracts and clear nearly a half million dollars.” Vreeland’s eyes opened in wonder, as he saw the file of waiting messengers in her gallery, and a cipher book at her side. He fled away in silence. At the door of his room, he was seized by Mary Kelly, her white hands trembling. “She is there now at the instrument, calling you—hasten.”