ce, "what do you propose to
do?" There was no answer.

After another pause he continued: "In settling the question, represent
your mother and myself by a cipher. That is all we are, if the logic
of your past action counts for anything. Again I ask, What do you
propose to do? No matter how pretty and flattered a girl may be, she
cannot alter gravitation. There are other facts just as inexorable.
Shutting your eyes to them, or any other phase of folly, will not make
the slightest difference."

"I think it's a horrid fact that I must marry a man that I don't
love."

"That is not one of the facts at all. Stock-gambler as I am, and in
almost desperate straits, I require nothing of the kind. Knowing you
as I do, I advise you to accept Arnault at once; but I do not demand
it; I do not even urge it. If you loved me, if you would say, 'Give
up this feverish life of risk; I will help you and suffer with you
in your poverty; I will marry Graydon Muir and share his poverty,' I
would leave Wall Street at once and forever. It's a maelstrom in
which men of my calibre and means are sucked down sooner or later. The
prospects now are that it will be sooner, unless I am helped through
this crisis."

"I believe you are mistaken about the Muirs being in financial
danger."

"I am not mistaken. They may have to suspend daring the coming week."

"I know that Graydon Muir has no suspicion of trouble."

"He is but a clerk in his brother's employ, and has just returned from
a long absence. Mr. Muir is one of the most reticent of men. I have
invested in the same dead stock that is swamping him, and so know
whereof I speak. Should this stock decline further--should it even
remain where it is much longer--he can't maintain himself. I know, for
I have taken pains to obtain information since I last went to town."

"But if the stock rises," she said, with the natural hope of a
speculator's daughter, "he is safe."

"Yes, _if_."

"How much time will you give me?" she asked, the lines of her face
growing hard and resolute.

"This is to be your choice, not mine," said her father, coldly. "You
shall not be able to say that I sold you or tried to sell you. Of
course it would be terribly hard for me to lose my footing and fall,
and I feel that I should not rise again. Arnault worships success
and worldly prestige. You are a part of his ambitious scheme. If you
helped him parry it out he would do almost anything you wished, and he
could throw b