andings."

"A trap! A trap!" I was warning myself. "You've been a fool long enough,
Blacklock." And aloud I said: "Well, Anita, the series is ended now.
There's no longer any occasion for our lying or posing to each other.
Any arrangements your uncle's lawyers suggest will be made."

I was bowing, to leave without shaking hands with her. But she would not
have it so. "Please!" she said, stretching out her long, slender arm and
offering me her hand.

What a devil possessed me that day! With every atom of me longing for her,
I yet was able to take her hand and say, with a smile, that was, I doubt
not, as mocking as my tone: "By all means let us be friends. And I trust
you will not think me discourteous if I say that I shall feel safer in our
friendship when we are both on neutral ground."

As I was turning away, her look, my own heart, made me turn again. I caught
her by the shoulders. I gazed into her eyes. "If I could only trust you,
could only believe you!" I cried.

"You cared for me when I wasn't worth it," she said. "Now that I am more
like what you once imagined me, you do not care."

Up between us rose Langdon's face--cynical, mocking, contemptuous. "Your
heart is _his_! You told me so! Don't _lie_ to me!" I exclaimed.
And before she could reply, I was gone.

Out from under the spell of her presence, back among the tricksters and
assassins, the traps and ambushes of Wall Street, I believed again;
believed firmly the promptings of the devil that possessed me. "She would
have given you a brief fool's paradise," said that devil. "Then what
a hideous awakening!" And I cursed the day when New York's insidious
snobbishness had tempted my vanity into starting me on that degrading chase
after "respectability."

"If she does not move to free herself soon," said I to myself, "I will put
my own lawyer to work. My right eye offends me. I will pluck it out."

XXXV. "WILD WEEK"

"The Seven" made their fatal move on treacherous Updegraff's treacherous
advice, I suspect. But they would not have adopted his suggestion had
it not been so exactly congenial to their own temper of arrogance and
tyranny and contempt for the people who meekly, year after year, presented
themselves for the shearing with fatuous bleats of enthusiasm.

"The Seven," of course, controlled directly, or indirectly, all but a
few of the newspapers with which I had advertising contracts. They also
controlled the main sources through which the