For months a fear had been following her which she had never dared to look at squarely, to which she had even been afraid to give a name. Sometimes it had been almost upon her, and sometimes so far behind that she had thought it could never overtake her again. When it was at her heels, she stayed within doors; for the very thought of a crowd, or of revolving wheels, was terrifying. At such times she told herself that she dared not look over the banister rail in her own upper hall, and fancied that her familiar servants eyed her curiously and whispered. A physician would have given her morbid fancies a name common enough in medical practice nowadays, and would have told her that she was as safe on a high place or in a crowd or beside the railroad tracks as anybody else. But to Harriet, her disease was simply a nameless, indeterminate horror, which brought with it the melancholy foreboding that in some season of stress it was certain to conquer her. In her new excitement this old dread had been forgotten, save in her momentary nervousness when she found herself alone in the street. She reached the station without experiencing even the fear that she would be afraid. But the platform was crowded, and she grew a shade paler as she was pushed and jostled close to the edge, and the reflection of the lights from the gleaming steel rails wakened a terror which was all the sharper because she knew it was perfectly irrational. When she saw the headlight of the train growing bigger and brighter out of the distance, she tried to step back, and failing that, her fear mastered her completely, and she clutched for support at the person who stood beside her. When the train came jolting to a stop, the screaming of the brakes sounded to her ears like an articulate human cry, and in fancy she saw a woman’s body mangled under the trucks. She did not know that she had stood hesitating, blocking the way for all the impatient passengers behind her, until the exasperated guard had taken her arm and fairly thrust her into the car; but when the horrible vision left her eyes, and she again became conscious of her present surroundings, she knew that she must have done something out of the ordinary, for everybody in the car who could see was staring at her. It was nearly nine o’clock before Sponley came home after an arduous and only partially successful quest. It is one of the perversities of finance that when a man has plenty of money, people will crowd around him, beseeching him to use theirs also; but when he needs it, when he really must have it, they look at him from the corners of their eyes and sidle away. After one or two flat failures, however, the Bear had succeeded in misleading some people into coming to his help. He had not got as much as he wanted; but enough, with luck and with the reënforcement the run at Bagsbury’s would give him, to last him through another day.