CHAPTER XXIII


When Mary Burton presented herself in the anteroom of the suite whose
ground-glass doors bore the legend "Edwardes and Edwardes," and asked
for the banker, a man with a pale and demoralized face gazed at her
blankly. Could any one seek to claim, except on most urgent business,
one minute out of these crucially vital hours? They were hours when the
real target of the whole panic-making bombardment was striving to
compress into each relentless instant a separate struggle for survival.

"I am Mary Burton," she said simply; and the man stood dubiously shaking
his head. His nerve-racked condition could only realize the name
Burton--and in these offices it was not just now a favored name.

As he stood, barring the way to an inner room marked "private," the door
opened and Jefferson Edwardes came hurriedly out. He looked as she had
never seen him look before, for deep lines had seared themselves into
his face, aging it distressingly, and the mouth was drawn as that of a
man who has been called back from the margin of death. But his eyes held
an unwavering fire and his jaw was set in the pattern of battle. Mary
remembered a painting of a solitary and wounded artilleryman leaning
against a shattered field gun amid the bodies of his fallen comrades.
The painter had put sternly into the face an expression of one who
awaits death, but denies defeat. Here, too, was such a face. The man,
hastening out, halted suddenly. Then he stepped back into his own
office, silently motioning her to follow.