there was some money to be got she had hold of him. "Now go away. We
shall do no good by any more of this sort of talk. I want to be alone
for a bit." He went away, sulkily acquiescent. There was a room always
kept ready for him on the same floor, at the further end of a short
thickly carpeted passage.

How she passed the night, this woman with no illusions to help her
through the hours which must have been sleepless I shouldn't like to say.
It ended at last; and this strange victim of the de Barral failure, whose
name would never be known to the Official Receiver, came down to
breakfast, impenetrable in her everyday perfection. From the very first,
somehow, she had accepted the fatal news for true. All her life she had
never believed in her luck, with that pessimism of the passionate who at
bottom feel themselves to be the outcasts of a morally restrained
universe. But this did not make it any easier, on opening the morning
paper feverishly, to see the thing confirmed. Oh yes! It was there. The
Orb had suspended payment--the first growl of the storm faint as yet, but
to the initiated the forerunner of a deluge. As an item of news it was
not indecently displayed. It was not displayed at all in a sense. The
serious paper, the only one of the great dailies which had always
maintained an attitude of reserve towards the de Barral group of banks,
had its "manner." Yes! a modest item of news! But there was also, on
another page, a special financial article in a hostile tone beginning
with the words "We have always feared" and a guarded, half-column leader,
opening with the phrase: "It is a deplorable sign of the times" what was,
in effect, an austere, general rebuke to the absurd infatuations of the
investing public. She glanced through these articles, a line here and a
line there--no more was necessary to catch beyond doubt the murmur of the
oncoming flood. Several slighting references by name to de Barral
revived her animosity against the man, suddenly, as by the effect of