“This I take to be the situation: You are millionnaires, and are in a strait for money. When I say ‘you’ I speak of your mother and yourselves as one. Your income, which formerly gave you a surplus of sixty thousand or seventy thousand dollars a year for new investments, is all at once not large enough to pay the interest on your debts, let alone your household and personal expenses. First, what has become of this income? It came from three sources--the furnaces, the telegraph stock, and a group of minor properties. These furnaces and iron-mines, which were all your own until you were persuaded to put a mortgage on them, have been closed by the orders of outsiders with whom you were persuaded to combine. Exit your income from _that_ source. Telegraph competition has cut down your earnings from the Northern Union stock to next to nothing. No doubt we shall find that your income from the other properties has been absorbed in salaries voted to themselves by the men into whose hands you have fallen. That is a very old trick, and I shall be surprised if it does not turn up here. In the second place, you are heavily in debt. On the 1st of January next, you must borrow money, apparently, to pay the interest on this debt. What makes it the harder is that you have not, as far as I can discover, had any value received whatever for this debt. In other words, you are being swindled out of something like one hundred thousand dollars per year, and not even such a property as your father left can stand _that_ very long. I should say it was high time you came to somebody for advice.” Before this terribly lucid statement the two girls sat aghast. It was Ethel who first found something to say. “We never dreamed of this, Mr. Tracy,” she said, breathlessly. “Our idea in coming, what we thought of most, was the poor people being thrown out of work in the winter, like this, and it being in some way, _our_ fault!” “People _think_ it is our fault,” interposed Kate. “Only to-day, as we were driving here, there were some men standing on the corner, and one of them called out a very cruel thing about us, as if we had personally injured him. But what you tell me--is it really as bad as that?” “I am afraid it is quite as bad as I have pictured it.” “And what is to be done? There must be some way to stop it,” said Kate. “You will put these men in prison the first thing, won’t you, Mr. Tracy?” asked Ethel. “And oh, I forgot! Who are the men who are robbing us?” Reuben smiled gravely, and ignored the latter question. “There are a good many first things to do,” he said. “I must think it all over very carefully before any step is taken. But the very beginning will be, I think, for you both to revoke the power of attorney your mother holds for you, and to obtain a statement of her management of the trusteeship over your property.” “She will refuse it plump! You don’t know mamma,” said Ethel.