As he stood trying to plumb the depth of the calamity, self-anger began to stir and buzz in his heart like a great bee. Like a tingling X-ray there went stabbing through the husk woven of a thousand inherent habits the humiliating knowledge of his own uselessness. In those profitless seasons through which he had sauntered, as he had strolled through his casual years of college, he had given least of his time and thought to the concern which had absorbed his father’s young manhood. He, John Valiant—one of its vice-presidents! waster, on whose expenditures there had never been a limit, who had strewn with the foolish free-handedness of a prodigal! Idler, with a reputation in three cities as a leader of cotillions! “Fool!” he muttered under his breath, and on the landscape outside the word stamped itself on everything as though a thousand little devils had suddenly turned themselves into letters of the alphabet and were skipping about in fours. Valiant started as the other spoke at his elbow. He, too, had come to the window and was looking down at the pavement. “How quickly some news spreads!” For the first time the young man noted that the street below was filling with a desultory crowd. [Pg 6]He distinguished a knot of Italian laborers talking with excited gesticulations—a smudged plasterer, tools in hand,—clerks, some hatless and with thin alpaca coats—all peering at the voiceless front of the great building, and all, he imagined, with a thriving fear in their faces. As he watched, a woman, coarsely dressed, ran across the street, her handkerchief pressed to her eyes. “The notice has gone up on the door,” said the manager. “I sent word to the police. Crowds are ugly sometimes.” Valiant drew a sudden sharp breath. The Corporation down in the mire, with crowds at its doors ready to clamor for money entrusted to it, the aggregate savings of widow and orphan, the piteous hoarded sums earned by labor over which pinched sickly faces had burned the midnight oil! The older man had turned back to the desk to draw a narrow typewritten slip of paper from a pigeonhole. “Here,” he said, “is a list of the bonds of the subsidiary companies recorded in your name. These are all, of course, engulfed in the larger failure. You have, however, your private fortune. If you take my advice, by the way,” he added significantly, “you’ll make sure of keeping that.” “What do you mean?” John Valiant faced him quickly. The other laughed shortly. “‘A word to the [Pg 7]wise,’” he quoted. “It’s very good living abroad. There’s a boat leaving to-morrow.” A dull red sprang into the younger face. “You mean—”