in order to snatch a little rest and calm, but Patsie refused
obstinately. She was afraid that at any moment her father might return
and call for her, declaring that she must be ready to go to him. Perhaps
she had fears that she did not express even to him, but she remained as
she had remained all day, waiting feverishly. Drake did not come back
until long after midnight. Then there were conferences to be held in his
library far into the gray morning. Everything seemed topsy-turvy. The
night was like the daytime. At every hour an automobile came rustling
up, a hurried ring of the bell followed by a ghostly flitting passage
into the library of strange, hurrying figures. Drake was no longer the
dejected, resigned man, broken in pride and courage, of the night
before. He put them aside hastily with a swift, convulsive hug for his
daughter and a welcoming handshake for Bojo. He would say nothing and
they could guess nothing of all the desperate remedies that were being
discussed and acted upon in the shifting conference within the library.
It was after four o'clock when Bojo left, after persuading Patsie of the
uselessness of further vigil. He felt too tremulously awake for need of
sleep. He went down the Avenue and in the convalescing gray of the weak
and sickly dawn passed the growing lines of depositors still obstinately
clinging to their posts, feeling as though he were walking a world of
nightmares and alarms. About seven o'clock he came back to the Court for
a tub and a cup of coffee. There he received news of Fred DeLancy, who
had been in frantically the night before begging for loans to back up
his disappearing margins. Neither Marsh nor Granning could come to his
assistance and he had left absolutely unnerved, vowing that he would be
wiped out if he could not raise only ten thousand dollars before the
morrow. Bojo shook his head. He had no desire to help him. The few
thousands he still retained seemed to him something miraculously solid
and precious in the whirling evaporation of fictitious values. There was
nothing he could do before the arrival of Doris and her husband, if
anything could be done then. He went down again to Wall Street merely as
a matter of curiosity and entered the spectators' gallery in the Stock
Exchange. The panic there had become a delirium. He stood leaning over
the railing gazing profoundly down into this frenzy which had once been
his life. Removed from its peril--judging it. What he saw was