uined! O father, how can that be? Methought you were a man of
much substance. Mother always said so."

Gertrude looked anxiously into the careworn face of her father,
which had greatly changed during the past weeks. He paid her
occasional visits in her self-chosen home, being one of those who
had ceased to fear contagion, and went about almost without
precaution, from sheer indifference to the long-continued peril. He
had been a changed man ever since the melancholy deaths of his son
and his wife; but today a darker cloud than any she had seen there
before rested upon his brow, and the daughter was anxious to learn
the reason of it. This it was which had wrung from the Master
Builder the foregoing confession.

"Your poor mother was partly right, and partly wrong. I might have
been a rich man, I might be a rich man even now--terrible as is the
state of trade in this stricken city--had it not been that she
would have me adventure beyond my means in her haste to see me
wealthy before my fellows. And the end of it is that I stand here
today a ruined man!"

Gertrude held in her arms a little child, over whom she bent from
time to time to assure herself that it slept. Her face had grown
pale and thin during her long confinement between the walls of this
house; yet it was a happier and more contented face than it had
been wont to be in the days when she lived in luxurious idleness at
her mother's side. She looked many years older than she had done
then, but there was a beauty and sweet serenity about her
appearance now which had not been visible in the days of old.

"What has happened during this sad time to ruin you, dear father?"
asked Gertrude gently, guessing that it would ease his heart to
talk of his troubles. "Is it the sudden stoppage of all trade?"

"That has been serious enough. It would have done much harm had
that been the only thing, but there be many, many other causes.
Thou art too young and unversed in the ways of business to
understand all; but I was not content to grow rich in the course of
business alone. I had ventures of all sorts afloat--on sea and on
land; and through the death of patrons, through the sudden stoppage
of all trade, numbers and numbers of these have come to no good. My
money is lost; my loans cannot be recovered. Men are dead or fled
to whom I looked for payment. Half-finished houses are thrown back
on my hands, since half London is empty. And poor Frederick's debts
are like the san