he train that was to carry
them to the new life. A phase of the existences of each was closed
definitely. The great corner was a thing of the past; the great corner
with the long train of disasters its collapse had started. The great
failure had precipitated smaller failures, and the aggregate of smaller
failures had pulled down one business house after another. For weeks
afterward, the successive crashes were like the shock and reverberation
of undermined buildings toppling to their ruin. An important bank had
suspended payment, and hundreds of depositors had found their little
fortunes swept away. The ramifications of the catastrophe were
unbelievable. The whole tone of financial affairs seemed changed. Money
was "tight" again, credit was withdrawn. The business world began to
speak of hard times, once more.

But Laura would not admit her husband was in any way to blame. He had
suffered, too. She repeated to herself his words, again and again:

"The wheat cornered itself. I simply stood between two sets of
circumstances. The wheat cornered me, not I the wheat."

And all those millions and millions of bushels of Wheat were gone now.
The Wheat that had killed Cressler, that had ingulfed Jadwin's fortune
and all but unseated reason itself; the Wheat that had intervened like
a great torrent to drag her husband from her side and drown him in the
roaring vortices of the Pit, had passed on, resistless, along its
ordered and predetermined courses from West to East? like a vast
Titanic flood, had passed, leaving Death and Ruin in its wake, but
bearing Life and Prosperity to the crowded cities and centres of Europe.

For a moment, vague, dark perplexities assailed her, questionings as to
the elemental forces, the forces of demand and supply that ruled the
world. This huge resistless Nourisher of the Nations--why was it that
it could not reach the People, could not fulfil its destiny, unmarred
by all this suffering, unattended by all this misery?

She did not know. But as she searched, troubled and disturbed for an
answer, she was aware of a certain familiarity in the neighbourhood the
carriage was traversing. The strange sense of having lived through this
scene, these circumstances, once before, took hold upon her.

She looked out quickly, on either hand, through the blurred glasses of
the carriage doors. Surely, surely, this locality had once before
impressed itself upon her imagination. She turned to her husband, an
exc