o no good by any more of this sort of talk. I want to be alone
for a bit." He went away, sulkily acquiescent. There was a room always
kept ready for him on the same floor, at the further end of a short
thickly carpeted passage.

How she passed the night, this woman with no illusions to help her
through the hours which must have been sleepless I shouldn't like to
say. It ended at last; and this strange victim of the de Barral
failure, whose name would never be known to the Official Receiver, came
down to breakfast, impenetrable in her everyday perfection. From the
very first, somehow, she had accepted the fatal news for true. All her
life she had never believed in her luck, with that pessimism of the
passionate who at bottom feel themselves to be the outcasts of a morally
restrained universe. But this did not make it any easier, on opening
the morning paper feverishly, to see the thing confirmed. Oh yes! It
was there. The Orb had suspended payment--the first growl of the storm
faint as yet, but to the initiated the forerunner of a deluge. As an
item of news it was not indecently displayed. It was not displayed at
all in a sense. The serious paper, the only one of the great dailies
which had always maintained an attitude of reserve towards the de Barral
group of banks, had its "manner." Yes! a modest item of news! But
there was also, on another page, a special financial article in a
hostile tone beginning with the words "We have always feared" and a
guarded, half-column leader, opening with the phrase: "It is a
deplorable sign of the times" what was, in effect, an austere, general
rebuke to the absurd infatuations of the investing public. She glanced
through these articles, a line here and a line there--no more was
necessary to catch beyond doubt the murmur of the oncoming flood.
Several slighting references by name to de Barral revived her animosity
against the man, suddenly, as by the effect of unforeseen moral support.
The miserable wretch!...

"You understand," Marlow interrupted the current of his narrative, "that
in order to be consecutive in my relation of this affair I am telling
you at once the details which I heard from Mrs Fyne later in the day,
as well as what little Fyne imparted to me with his usual solemnity
during that morning call. As you may easily guess the Fynes, in their
apartments, had read the news at the same time, and, as a matter of
fact, in the same august and highly moral news