She might cry, and the sight of tears would unman me. There's time enough, I thought. Why not to-morrow instead? Yet in my heart I knew it would be no easier to do it to-morrow than it was to-day. By some strange freak of the imagination those unshed tears of hers seemed already dropping upon my nerves. "There's time enough, she'll be obliged to hear it in the end," something within me repeated with a kind of dulness. And with the words, while my head touched the pillow, I started suddenly wide awake as though from the flash of a lantern that was turned inward. Trivial impressions of the afternoon stood out as if illuminated against the outer darkness, and there hovered before me the face of the old woman, in the plaid shawl, with her twisted mouth, and the foot of her grey yarn stocking held out in her palsied hand. "I reckon I'd feel easier if I had it back," said a voice somewhere in my brain. CHAPTER XXV WE FACE THE FACTS AND EACH OTHER The panic which had begun with the depositors of small accounts, spread next day to the holders of larger ones, and even while I stood at my window and watched the cash brought in in bags through the cheering crowd on the sidewalk, I knew that the quarter of a million dollars would go down with the rest. My financial insight had misled me, and the bank funds, which I had believed so carefully guarded, had suffered the same fate as my private fortune. There were more serious questions behind the immediate need of currency, and these questions drummed in my mind now, dull and regular as the beat of a hammer. For three days we paid off our accounts, and at the end of that time, when I left the building, after the run had stopped, it seemed to me that the city had a deserted and trampled look, as if some enormous picnic had been held in the streets. A few loose shreds of paper, a banana peel here and there, the ends of numerous cigars, and the white patch torn from a woman's petticoat littered the pavement. Over all there was a thick coating of dust, and the wind, blowing straight from the east, whipped swirls of it into our faces, as the General and I drove slowly up-town in his buggy. "You look down in the mouth, Ben," he remarked, as I took the reins. "I've got an infernal toothache, General; it kept me awake all night." "Well, bless my soul, you ought to be thankful if it takes your mind off the country. I haven't seen such a state of affairs since the days of reconstruction. I tell you, my boy, the only thing on earth to do is to take a julep. Lithia water is well enough in times of prosperity, but you can't support a panic on it. I've gone back to my julep, and if I die of it, I'll die with a little spirit in me." "There're worse things than death ahead of me, General, there's ruin." "It's the toothache, Ben. Don't let it take all the spirit out of you."