her is the man to help; that's his business, and that's where
Minott wants to go. If there is anything of value in this Warehouse
Company, Arthur Breen & Co. can carry the certificates for Minott until
they go up and he can get out. If there is nothing, then the sooner
Garry sells out and lets it go the better. Stay out, Jack. It's not in
the line of your duty. It's hard on his wife and he is having a devil of
a row to hoe, but it will be the best thing for him in the end."

Jack listened in respectful silence, as he always did, to MacFarlane's
frank outburst, but it neither changed his mind nor cooled his ardor.
Where his heart was concerned his judgment rarely worked. Then, loyalty
to a friend in distress was the one thing his father had taught him. He
did not agree with his Chief's view of the situation. If Garry was born
a gambler, he had kept that fact concealed from him and from his wife.
He recalled the conversation he had had with him some weeks before, when
he was so enthusiastic over the money he was going to make in the
new Warehouse deal. He had been selected as the architect for the
new buildings, and it was quite natural that he should have become
interested in the securities of the company. This threatened calamity
was one that might overtake any man. Get Garry out of this hole and he
would stay out; let him sink, and his whole career would be ruined. And
then there was a sentimental side to it even if Garry was a gambler--one
that could not be ignored when he thought of Corinne and the child.

Late in the afternoon, his mind still unsettled, he poured out his
anxieties to Ruth. She did not disappoint him. Her big heart swelled
only with sympathy for the wife who was suffering. It made no difference
to her that Corinne had never been even polite, never once during the
sojourn of the Minotts in the village having manifested the slightest
interest either in her own or Jack's affairs--not even when MacFarlane
was injured, nor yet when the freshet might have ruined them all. Ruth's
generous nature had no room in it for petty rancors or little hurts.
Then, too, Jack was troubled for his friend. What was there for her to
do but to follow the lamp he held up to guide her feet--the lamp which
now shed its glad effulgence over both? So they talked on, discussing
various ways and means, new ties born of a deeper understanding binding
them the closer--these two, who, as they sometimes whispered to each
other, were "