But you must
regard it as an advance and name your fee to the Boston folk so you can
pay it back."

He protested again, rather weakly.

"It looks like extortion; like another graft," he said; and now she lost
patience with him.

"Of all the Puritan fanatics!" she cried. "If it were a simple commercial
transaction by which you would save your clients a round seventy million
dollars, which would otherwise be lost, would you scruple to take a
proportionate fee?"

"No; certainly not."

"Well, then; you go and tell Mr. Loring to wire his Advisory Board, and to
do it to-night."

"But I'll have to name a figure," said Kent.

"Of course," she replied.

Kent thought about it for a long minute. Then he said: "I wonder if ten
thousand dollars, and expenses, would paralyze them?"

Miss Van Brock's comment was a little shriek of derision.

"I knew you'd make difficulties when it came to the paying part of it, and
since I didn't know, myself, I wired Mr. Ormsby again. Here is what he
says," and she untwisted a second telegram and read it to him.

"'Fee should not be less than five per cent. of bonded indebtedness;
four-fifths in stock at par; one-fifth cash; no cure, no pay.'"

"Three million five hundred thousand dollars!" gasped Kent.

"It's only nominally that much," she laughed. "The stock part of it is
merely your guaranty of good faith: it is worth next to nothing now, and
it will be many a long day before it goes to par, even if you are
successful in saving its life. So your magnificent fee shrinks to seven
hundred thousand dollars, less your expenses."

"But heavens and earth! that's awful!" said Kent.

"Not when you consider it as a surgeon's risk. You happen to be the one
man who has the idea, and if it isn't carried out, the patient is going to
die to-morrow night, permanently. You are the specialist in this case, and
specialists come high. Now you may go and attend to the preliminary
details, if you like."

He found his hat and stood up. She stood with him; but when he took her
hand she made him sit down again.

"You have at least three degrees of fever!" she exclaimed; "or is it only
the three-million-five-hundred-thousand-dollar shock? What have you been
doing to yourself?"

"Nothing, I assure you. I haven't been sleeping very well for a few
nights. But that is only natural."

"And I said you must have a cool head! Will you do exactly as I tell you
to?"

"If you don't make it too hard."

"Ta