er's path, is here. I'm told that he is
half-mad, and I must do what I can." He opened a door into a small
conference-room. "Will you wait for me--there?"

With his arm around her he led her across the threshold, and then,
closing that door, he came back and opened the other.

The man who half-stepped, half-stumbled in staggered to the desk chair
and dropped into it to raise a face in which the eyes burned wildly. The
whole figure shook in an ague of unnerved excitement. He spread two
trembling hands and tragically announced, "I'm ruined."

Edwardes nodded gravely. "You need a physician, Fairley. You're
unstrung," he suggested. "Perhaps a drop of brandy would help. I think I
have some here."

"No!" the reply was violent, and the President of the Metallic National
shook his head with the uncontrolled air of a man who is close to the
border of insanity. "No, by God, I'm past physicians. What I need next
is an undertaker." He dropped his head to the desk and broke into a
crazed storm of weak sobs.

"There is no profit in wild talk," his host reminded him. "I'm ruined,
too. We must make a fresh start."

"Fresh start, hell!" The words rang queerly through the accompaniment of
a bitter laugh. "Hamilton Burton took me and squeezed me dry. He put the
thumbscrews on me and bled me of my Coal and Ore stock. He made me a
traitor to Malone and today when Malone might have saved me I had no
friends. Then because you sought to befriend me, Burton turned on me and
ruined me. My family will be in the streets. Now--" the voice rose into
a high treble of frenzy which penetrated to the room where Mary Burton
waited--"I'm going to kill Hamilton Burton first and myself next."

With the wild threat the banker rose unsteadily and his palsied hand
went into his overcoat pocket, to come out clutching a magazine pistol
which he brandished before him.

Edwardes' first thought was to seize the wrist, but the breadth of the
table intervened and he knew that he was dealing with a man of
temporarily dethroned reason. So he held the wild and shifting gaze, as
well as he could, with the cool steadiness of his own eyes and spoke in
a measured, soothing voice:

"I shouldn't do that, Fairley. In the first place you don't know where
to find him. Your effort would probably fail and you would only be
locked up before you accomplished either purpose."

The noise of the outer offices had drowned the visitor's excited tones
among the employees, but