"Gunther," he said, suddenly carried away by a feeling of prophetic elation, "up to now you’ve known me only as a speculator. Now I’m going to become a conservative force. In a month I’m coming to you with a proposition. You’re the only man I would ever trust. Good-night." His automobile was waiting. He threw himself riotously into it, giving the address of Mrs. Kildair’s apartment; and as he felt the pleasant, exhilarating sensation which the speed of his machine conveyed to him, he repeated, feeling suddenly how at last he had emerged from the perils of the first phase which he had once so frankly defined: "Now, I’ll be conservative!" Unlike Gunther, who had behind him the traditions of generations of authority, Slade had that typical quality so perplexing in the American millionaire of sudden fortune—the childlike eagerness for admiration. When he arrived at Mrs. Kildair’s and found that she was still absent, he was consumed with a nervous impatience. He seated himself at the piano, playing over clumsily refrains of the crude ranch songs which came to him as an echo of his earlier struggling days. But these echoes of a past conflict seemed only to whet his impatience. He ended with a crashing discord and rose, lighting another cigar, pacing the broad space of the studio with rapid, restless strides, surprised at the annoyance which her absence brought him. When Mrs. Kildair entered, let in by Henriette, her maid, Slade flung aside his cigar and strode impatiently forward. One glance at his triumphant face told her what she wanted to know. She made a quick sign to him with her hand and turned her back, disengaging her opera cloak with exaggerated slowness, drawing a deep breath. Then she sent Henriette upstairs to her room to wait until she called. "Congratulations," she said calmly, entering the studio and extending her hand. "You have won!" "How do you know?" he said, taken back by her composure. "It is there—in your eyes," she said, passing her fingers so close to them that he seemed to feel their soft contact. "Tell me all about it." "Yes, I’ve beaten them—Fontaine, Barton, Forscheim, Haggerty, the whole lot of them," he cried with a gleeful laugh. "More, I’ve forced myself into their hidebound circle. You’ll see—in a month I’ll be one of them." At times roguishly delighted as a boy, at others with flashes of primitive power, he related to the eager woman all the details of the night and the desperate stake he had played to make a failure so colossal that they themselves would recoil before it. "And if Majendie had not killed himself?" she said breathlessly, womanlike perceiving the hazards of fate.