Ruyler squared his back lest the man, glancing over, recognize him. That
would be more than he could bear. As the car reached Front Street he
sprang from the dummy and walked rapidly north to Ruyler and Sons. He
locked himself in his private office, dismissing his stenographer with
the excuse that he had important business to think out and must not be
disturbed.


II

But business was forgotten. He was as nearly in a state of panic as was
possible for a man of his inheritance and ordered life. He belonged to
that class of New Yorker that looked with cold disgust upon the women of
commerce. So far as he knew he had never exchanged a word with one of
them, and had often listened with impatience to the reminiscences of his
San Francisco friends, now married and at least intermittently decent, of
the famous ladies who once had reigned in the gay night life of San
Francisco.

And his mother-in-law! The mother of his wife!

Her name was Marie. In that chaos of flesh an interested eye might
discover the ruins of beauty. Her hair, he knew, had been black. He
recalled the terror expressed in every line of that mountainous
figure--which may well have been perfect twenty years ago. The green
pallor of her cheek! And he had long felt, rather than knew, that she
possessed magnificent powers of bluff. Her dignified exit had been no
more convincing to him than to Bisbee.

He went back over the past and recalled all he knew of the woman whose