But when he had walked to where the house stood revealed to him, bold against the starry sky, his steps slowed, faltered, stopped altogether. All the big rooms were lighted brilliantly, as if there were a party in the house. He knew the look,--having had his fill of that mockery of hospitality which Doris called entertaining. It would be like her, he told himself between clenched teeth. With Parowan fortunes sliding into the abyss of cataclysmic failure, it would be like Doris to throw wide her doors to merrymaking, to fling her defiance into the face of the town over which disaster hovered vulturelike, waiting to feed upon the broken fortunes left in the wake of the boom. He looked for what seemed a long while at the window upstairs, where a dim light was burning in the corner room. He knew well the meaning of that light also. It meant that baby Mary was in her bed, tucked in by the nurse, while her mother laughed and talked and "entertained" in the drawing-rooms below. Bill muttered a great oath, turned and went back to his dingy little board-and-canvas camp. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE BILL IS BACK WHERE HE STARTED Bill bought Parowan stock. When he saw that the price he had named was holding back many sales, that many a stockholder suspected a shrewd motive in his buying and held on in the hope of riding another high wave of frenzied finance, Bill gave a snort and sent another bulletin out from Parowan headquarters. He would buy Parowan stock at one-fifty. That day he wrote checks, an unpleasant curl of the lip betraying his consciousness of his wife, of the look in her eyes, of the hard bitterness of her tones because he was spending money on something other than her whims. His anger held and hardened with the congealing quality of his contempt for her selfishness, her cold-blooded acquisitiveness. He felt that the greatest ease he could know was never to see Doris again so long as he lived. Wherefore, he did not go home. But Doris called him on the telephone, just before noon. "Bill, are you going to be home for luncheon?" "No." "When _are_ you coming, then? Don't you realize what people will be saying? I should think you might have some little consideration for _me_." "I can trust you to attend to that matter," Bill replied evenly. "I have never yet known you to fail. When I hear from San Francisco I shall let you know. I wired last evening, and should hear to-day or to-morrow." "Bill Dale, you----" "Yes. Certainly. Good-by." Bill hung up and turned back unemotionally to his work. His lawyer, who sat within three feet of him, believed that Bill was speaking to a client, or an employee of some kind.