blink that seems to begin nowhere; though it is to be suspected that it was
first whispered over the telephone--together with an urgent selling order by
some employee in the cable service. A sharp spasm convulsed the convalescent
share- list. In five minutes the dull noise of the kerbstone market in Broad
Street had leapt to a high note of frantic interrogation. From within the hive
of the Exchange itself could be heard a droning hubbub of fear, and men rushed
hatless in and out. Was it true? asked every man; and every man replied, with
trembling lips, that it was a lie put out by some unscrupulous 'short'
interest seeking to cover itself. In another quarter of an hour news came of a
sudden and ruinous collapse of 'Yankees' in London at the close of the Stock
Exchange day. It was enough. New York had still four hours' trading in front
of her. The strategy of pointing to Manderson as the saviour and warden of the
markets had recoiled upon its authors with annihilating force, and Jeffrey,
his ear at his private telephone, listened to the tale of disaster with a set
jaw. The new Napoleon had lost his Marengo. He saw the whole financial
landscape sliding and falling into chaos before him. In half an hour the news
of the finding of Manderson's body, with the inevitable rumour that it was
suicide, was printing in a dozen newspaper offices; but before a copy reached
Wall Street the tornado of the panic was in full fury, and Howard B. Jeffrey
and his collaborators were whirled away like leaves before its breath.

All this sprang out of nothing.

Nothing in the texture of the general life had changed. The corn had not
ceased to ripen in the sun. The rivers bore their barges and gave power to a
myriad engines. The flocks fattened on the pastures, the herds were
unnumbered. Men laboured everywhere in the various servitudes to which they
were born, and chafed not more than usual in their bonds. Bellona tossed and
murmured as ever, yet still slept her uneasy sleep. To all mankind save a
million or two of half- crazed gamblers, blind to all reality, the death of