ement downward of values had been slow and gradual and that
prophecies of dark days were current. Matters with Marsh were going
badly. Advertisers were deserting the paper, there had been several
minor strikes with costly readjustments. Roscoe seemed to have lost his
early enthusiasm, to be increasingly moody, impatient and quick to take
offense. The reasons given for the business depression were many, over
capitalization, timidity of the small investors due to the exposure of
great corporations, distrust of radical political reforms. Whatever the
causes, the receding tide had come. People were apprehensive,
dispirited, talking poverty. Granning held that the country was paying
for the sins of the great financial adventurers and the cost of the
giddy structures they had thrown up. Marsh from the knowledge of his
newspaper world, held that below all was the coalescing power of great
banking systems, arrayed against the government on one side and on the
other, waiting their opportunity to crush the new-risen financial idea
of the Trust Company organized to deal in speculative ventures denied to
them. When Bojo in his simplicity asked why in a great growing nation of
boundless resources, a panic should ever be necessary, each sought to
explain with confusing logic which did not convince at all. Only from it
he gathered that above the great productive mechanism of the nation was
an artificial structure, in the possession of powerful groups able to
control the sources of credit on which the sources of production depend.

Four days after he had read in the newspapers the account of Doris's
wedding to Boskirk, about seven o'clock in the evening, while he was
waiting for Roscoe to call for him to go out to dinner, Sweeney, the
Jap, brought him a card.

It was from Patsie, hastily scribbled across, "I am outside. Can you
come and see me?"

"Where is she? Outside?" he said all in a flutter. Sweeney informed him
that she was waiting in an automobile.

He guessed that something serious must have happened and hurried down.
Patsie's face was at the window, watching impatiently. When she saw him
she relaxed momentarily with a sigh of relief.

"Why, Patsie, what's wrong?" he said instantly, taking her hand.

"You can come? It's important."

"Of course."

He jumped in and the car made off.

"Tell him to drive through the Park."

He transmitted the order. And then turned to look at her.

"I am so worried!" she said at once,