him, his failure would, if the facts were properly made known,
reckon as one of the most honourable on record, though he was pleased to
look upon such a contingency as a certain source of scandal and more
than possible disgrace.

Unconsciously his own determined industry in book-keeping gave him a
little more confidence. In his great anxiety he was spared the terrible
uncertainty felt by a man who does not precisely know his own financial
position at a given critical moment. His studiously acquired outward
calm also stood him in good stead. Even San Giacinto who knew the
financial world as few men knew it watched his youthful cousin with
curiosity and not without a certain sympathy and a very little
admiration. The young man's face was growing stern and thoughtful like
his own, lean, grave and strong. San Giacinto remembered that night a
year and a half earlier when he had warned Orsino of the coming danger,
and he was almost displeased with himself now for having taken a step
which seemed to have been unnecessary. It was San Giacinto's principle
never to do anything unnecessary, because a useless action meant a loss
of time and therefore a loss of advantage over the adversary of the
moment. San Giacinto, in different circumstances, would have made a
good general--possibly a great one; his strange life had made him a
financier of a type singular and wholly different from that of the men
with whom he had to deal. He never sought to gain an advantage by a
deception, but he won everything by superior foresight, imperturbable
coolness, matchless rapidity of action and undaunted courage under all
circumstances. It needs higher qualities to be a good man, but no others
are needed to make a successful one. Orsino possessed something of the
same rapidity and much of a similar coolness and courage, but he lacked
the foresight. It was vanity, of the most pardonable kind, indeed, but
vanity nevertheless which had led him to embark upon his dangerous
enterprise--not in the determination to accomplish for the sake of
accomplishing, still less in the direct desire for wealth as an ultimate
object, but in the almost boyish longing to show to his own people that
there was more in him than they suspected. The gift of foresight is
generally weakened by the presence of vanity, but when vanity takes its
place the result is as likely to be failure as not, and depends almost
directly upon chance alone.

The crisis in Orsino's life was at ha