For the moment he forgot Arthur and Arthur’s business, and thought only of his father and of their own plight. “We are gone!” he reflected, his face almost as pale as the faces in the street. “We are ruined! There is no hope. When this reaches Aldersbury we must close!” He could no longer bear the inaction. He could not sit still. He paid off the chaise—with difficulty, owing to the press—and pushed forward on foot. But his mind still ran on Aldersbury, was still busy with the fate of their own bank. He felt an immense pity for his father, and recognized that until this moment, when panic in its most dreadful form stared him in the face, he had not realized the catastrophe, or the sadness, or the finality of it. They must close. They must begin the world again, begin it at the bottom, in competition with a multitude of beggared men, three-fourths of whom had never speculated, never touched a share, never left the safe path of industrious commerce, but were now to pay with all they possessed in the world, their daughters’ portions and their sons’ fortunes, for the recklessness or the extravagance of others. For a space there was vouchsafed to him the wider vision, and he saw the thing that was passing in its true light. He saw the wave of ruin spread from these crowded streets ever farther and farther, from city to town and town to country; and where it passed it wrecked homes, it made widows, it swept away the dowries of children, it separated lovers, it overwhelmed the happiness of thousands and tens of thousands. He saw the honest trader, whose father’s good name was his glory, broken in heart and fortune through the failure of others, his health shattered, his house sold over his head, his pensioners and dependants flung into the workhouse. He saw deluded parsons doomed to spend the close of their lives in a hopeless wrestle with debt, their sons taken from school, their daughters sent out into a cold and unfeeling world. He saw squires, the little gods of their domain, men once wealthy, doomed to drink themselves into forgetfulness of the barred entail and the lost estate; the great house would be closed, the agent would squeeze the tenants, and they in turn the laborers, until the very village shop would feel the pinch. Thousands upon thousands would lose their hoarded savings, and, too old to begin again, would sink, they and their children and their children’s children, into the under-world, there to be lost amid the dregs of the population. And he and his? Why should they escape? How could they escape? It would be much if they could feel, while they shared the common lot, that they had deserved to escape, that they were not of those whose wild speculations had brought this disaster on their kind.