They had been far up the road--to Arcularius's, maybe, there swinging around and whirling back. They had flown down the long country road, and back into the city, to meet--it was early in the day--the great procession of sleighing folk streaming northward up Broadway. It was one of New York's great, irregular, chance-set carnivals, and every sleigh was out, from the "exquisite's" gilded chariot, a shell hardly larger than a fair-sized easy-chair, to the square, low-hung red sledge of the butcher-boy, who braved it with the fashionables, his _Schneider_-made clothes on his burly form, and his girl by his side, in her best Bowery bonnet. Everybody was a-sleighing. The jingle of countless bells fell on the crisp air in a sort of broken rhythm--a rude _tempo rubato_. It was fashionable then. But we--we amuse ourselves less boisterously. They drew up at the door of the Dolph house, and Jacob Dolph lifted his wife out of the sleigh, and carried her up the steps into the breakfast-room, and set her down in her easy-chair. He was bending over her to ask her if her ride had done her good, when a servant entered and handed him a letter marked "Immediate." He read it, and all the color of the winter's day faded out of his face. "I've got to go down to Van Riper's," he said, "at once; he wants me." "Has anything happened to--to Eustace?" his wife cried out. "He doesn't say so--I suppose--I suppose it's only business of some sort," her husband said. His face was white. "Don't detain me, dear. I'll come back as soon as--as soon as I get through." He kissed her, and was gone. Half an hour later he sat in the office of Abram Van Riper's Son. There was no doubting it, no denying it, no palliating it even. The curse had come upon the house of Jacob Dolph, and his son was a thief and a fugitive. It was an old story and a simple story. It was the story of the Haskins's million and the Dolphs' hundred thousand; it was the story of the boy with a hundred thousand in prospect trying to spend money against the boy with a million in sight. It was the story of cards, speculation--another name for that sort of gambling which is worse than any on the green cloth--and what is euphemistically known as wine.