description. Half a dozen chairs had been
carelessly pushed back, there were empty champagne bottles upon the
sideboard, the air was faintly odorous of tobacco smoke--blue wreaths
were still curling upwards towards the frescoed ceiling. Yet the
gathering had not been altogether a festive one. There were sheets of
paper still lying about covered with figures, a brass-bound ledger lay
open at the further end of the table, In the background a young man,
slim, pale, ill-dressed in sober black, was filling a large tin box with
documents and letters.

It had been a meeting of giants. Men whose names were great in the world
of finance had occupied those elaborately decorated leather chairs.
There had been cynicism, criticism, and finally enthusiasm. For the man
who remained it had been a triumph. He had appeared to do but little in
the way of persuasion. His manners had been brusque, and his words had
been few. Yet he remained the master of the situation. He had gained
a victory not only financial but moral, over men whose experience and
knowledge were far greater than his. He was no City magnate, nor had he
ever received any training in those arts and practices which go to the
making of one. For his earlier life had been spent in a wilder country
where the gambling was for life and not merely for gold. It was Scarlett
Trent who sat there in thoughtful and absorbed silence. He was leaning a
little back in a comfortably upholstered chair, with his eyes fixed on
a certain empty spot upon the table. The few inches of polished mahogany
seemed to him--empty of all significance in themselves--to be reflecting
in some mysterious manner certain scenes in his life which were now
very rarely brought back to him. The event of to-day he knew to be the
culmination of a success as rapid as it had been surprising. He was a
millionaire. This deal to-day, in which he had held his own against the
shrewdest and most astute men of the great city, had more than doubled
his already large fortune. A few years ago he had landed in England
friendless and unknown, to-day he had stepped out from even amongst
the chosen few and had planted his feet in the higher lands whither
the faces of all men are turned. With a grim smile upon his lips, he
recalled one by one the various enterprises into which he had entered,
the courage with which he had forced them through, the solid strength
with which he had thrust weaker men to the wall and had risen a little
hi