at
a marvelous, incomprehensible change had swept over him.

The tired, hectored man turned to Carmen. And she called Hitt and
Waite and the keen-minded Beaubien. The latter's wide business
experience and worldly knowledge now stood them all in good stead, and
she threw herself like a bulwark between the stricken man and the
hounds that roared at his gates. There were those among them who, like
Ames, had bitterly fought all efforts at industrial and social reform,
and yet who saw the dawning of a new era in the realms of finance, of
politics, of religion. There were those who sensed the slow awakening
of the world-conscience, and who resisted it desperately, and who now
sat frightened and angered at the thought of losing their great
leader. Their attitude toward life, like his, had been wrong from the
beginning; they, like him, were striking examples of the dire effects
of a false viewpoint in the impoverishing of human life. But, with
him, they had built up a tremendous material fabric. And now they
shook with fear as they saw its chief support removed. For they must
know that his was a type that was fast passing, and after it must come
the complete breakdown of the old financial order. His world-embracing
gambling--which touched all men in some way, for it had to do with the
very necessities of life, with crops, with railroads, with industries,
and out of which he had coined untold millions--had ceased forever.
What did it portend to them?

And to him also came Reverend Darius Borwell, in whose congregation
sat sanctimonious malefactors of vast wealth, whose pockets bulged
with disease-laden profits from the sales of women's bodies and souls.
Reverend Borwell came to offer the sufferer the dubious consolations
of religion--and inquire if his beautiful change of heart would affect
the benefaction which he had designed for the new church.

Ah, this was the hour when the fallen giant faced the Apostle's awful
question: What fruit had ye then in those things whereof ye are now
ashamed? _For the end of those things is death!_

And then came Monsignor Lafelle, asking not to see the sick man, but
the girl. And, alone with her in the great library that day, he bent
low over her hand and begged that she would forgive and forget. It was
he who told Mrs. Ames that flagrantly false tale of the girl's
parentage. He had received it from Wenceslas, in Cartagena. It was he
who, surmising the dark secret of Ames, had concluded tha