I  
"Well, he's gone, then?"
 
Rawn turned toward his wife a face years older than it had been an hour ago, a face haggard and lined, pasty in color. His bitter agitation was evident in his voice, in his expression, in the stoop of his shoulders—in a score of signs not usual with him. Virginia was even more noncommittal than her wont as she faced him. Grace had disappeared.
 
"What did you do—how did you handle him, Jennie?" he began—"you were talking for over an hour there! Did you manage to hold things together—will he let up?"
 
She faced him full now, as he stood in the blaze of the electric lights in the interior of the house, where Halsey had left her, in the chair from which she had not moved since his departure. Every delicate, clear-cut feature was fully visible now. Her lips just parted to show the double row of her white teeth in a faint smile. Her chin was a trifle up, her head high.
 
"He will wait a little while," she answered quietly. "At least, I think so."
 
"Good! Fine! I knew you'd do it, Jennie! You're a wonder!—I don't think there's a woman in all the world like you!" He advanced toward her.
 
"Don't paw me over!" she exclaimed, drawing back.
 
"Well, now, then—I only meant—"
 
"I don't want to talk," she said. "He's gone, yes, and he'll not do anything for a little while, I think. It's enough for to-night—I'm tired. This has been a horrible evening for me. I never thought to see a time like this!"
 
"Horrible for all of us!" exclaimed John Rawn. "That man took advantage of me out there—I ought to have wrung his neck for him, and I would have done it if it hadn't been for you two women. Of course, we don't want scenes if they can be avoided, for there's no telling what talk might run into if it got out. But just the same, Jennie, don't you see—" and his face assumed a still more anxious look—"he can ruin us all whenever he gets ready, and he's wise enough to know that. I can't do anything with him now. Something's gone wrong with him, and I don't know what!"
 
 
 
 
II
 
"No, you don't know what," she said slowly. "I don't think you in the least imagine what!"
 
"Do you, then?" he demanded. "If you do, why don't you tell? Do you know that everything we've got in the world is up at stake on this? He can kill my credit, he can split this company wide open, he can break me in spite of all. See what he's done in return for what I've done for him! Sometimes I wonder if there's such a thing as honor left in the world!"
 
"So! Do you?" She rose now, and would have left him.
 
"Well, I want to talk this over with you. Please, Jennie. Sit down," he said. "Tell me what you said. I want to know where things are, so I can act to-morrow—or maybe even before to-morrow. You don't realize what a hole I'm in."
 
"What did I say to him?" she repeated, looking down at her wrists. "Nothing very much. I told him if he went on he'd ruin us all; that it wasn't right for him to do it. I told him we wanted him—I wanted him—to wait—for my sake."
 
"For your sake?"
 
"Yes, I did," she answered calmly. "I said that."
 
"It was best!" he cried, rising and walking up and down excitedly. "What a mind you have, Jennie—what a woman you are! Where'd I be without you, I wonder now? Why, of course, that was the way! Any man will do anything that you tell him to, especially a young man—of course, of course!"
 
"Thank you," she commented coldly; "thank you very much."
 
 
 
 
III
 
He sought to put a consoling or an explanatory hand on her shoulder, but she shook him off, shivering.
 
"I don't mean anything," he began confusedly. "Get me straight, now. I only wanted to say that when you work for me in this you are working for your own sake also. It's all up to you, Jennie, right now. If you can't land him, we're gone—it's no use my trying to do anything with him. Do you know, I'm going to send you out after him."
 
"Send me out?"
 
"Yes; things have to be done the best way they can be done. That fellow can say one word which'll ruin us in one day's time. He can break the values in International more than we can mend in months. Our men would begin to cover as soon as they caught a hint that anything was really wrong. As for me, I'm spread out for millions in the general market. If they began to hammer me I couldn't come through—I wouldn't last a week. The thing to do is to keep this news safe until I can protect myself—until I can protect us all. Now it's you, Jennie, that's got to do that—it's you! I'm sending you out after him."
 
"I always thought, Mr. Rawn," said she, "that you played a dangerous game, so long as you simply trusted that he'd do anything you told him."
 
"Yes, I see it now. But he always was odd—he always held something back. I tell you, he's crazy! Now, he's either just crazy over his fool Socialist ideas, or else he's going to hold out for a squeeze. In the first case you can handle him. In the second, I can.
 
"You see—I couldn't tell our directorate," he went on; "but there was always something lacking which I couldn't handle myself. We need him, and we've got to have him! You can get him, I know you can. You can do anything you like. You're wonderful!"
 
She sat and looked at him, her lips still parted in the same enigmatic smile which he did not like to see; but she made no answer.
 
"What's wrong with him?" he went on immediately. "What does he say is the trouble, anyway? And is it the truth that he's got the overhead current?"
 
She nodded. "Of course, I know something about it from my work in the office. Yes, he told me that he had done what you have all been trying to do so long. He said he came over under power from the overhead—just as he told you."
 
"He may be lying, for all we know. You can't look at a car and tell where its charge came from. Electricity is electricity, to all intents and purposes. What I want to know is, what he's got against us, anyhow, Jennie?"
 
"Well, for one thing, he seemed troubled because Grace would not go back with him. He seemed to think that you and the life you could give her had been the reason for her abandoning him."
 
"Why, what nonsense! Grace hasn't abandoned him! And I only got her over here because I needed her myself—before—well, before we were married. Who was to take care of me, I'd like to know? And you say he complains of that!"
 
"That was one of the things."
 
"But Grace would go back! She's none too well pleased now, since you and I have taken charge here. She'd go back to Charley to-morrow if he asked her—why, I'd make him take care of her, of course. The trouble with him is, he values his own personal affairs too much. That's no way to begin in the business world. A man has to bend everything to the one purpose of success. Look at me, for instance."
 
 
 
 
IV
 
She did look at him, calmly, coldly, without the tremor of an eyelid, without raising a hand to touch him as he stood close by, without indeed making any verbal answer. A slight shudder passed over her, visible in the twitch of her shoulders.
 
"It's getting cooler!" he exclaimed. "I'll fetch a wrap for you." And so hastened away, obsequious, uxorious, as he always was with her.
 
"But Charley never would take any counsel from anybody," resumed he presently. "He's always been tractable enough, that's true; never raised much of a disturbance until to-night—I don't see why he cut up so ugly now. He's not crazy over Grace, and if the truth be told, Grace isn't the sort of girl that a man would get crazy over. You're that sort."
 
"Perhaps not," she smiled faintly. "Just the same, Grace's attitude may have started him to thinking. When he began thinking he seemed to conclude that all the world was wrong."
 
"And he's starting in to set it right! He's going in for the uplift stunt, eh? That's the way with a lot of these reformers! They want to set the world right according to their own ideas. They don't pay any attention to the men who keep them from starving. I made that boy—what he's got he owes to me."
 
"Indeed! How singular! He says that it's just the other way about; that what you have you took from him! He says you want to take more—more than your share—from things that belong to everybody."
 
"What's that! What's that! Well, now, of all the insane idiocy I ever heard! Good God, what next! Him, Charles Halsey, the man I brought up with me! Jennie, I never heard the like of that in all my time."
 
"But if that's the way he feels, now's not the time to argue that with him!"
 
"But, good God, the effrontery—"
 
"All the world is full of effrontery, Mr. Rawn," she said—continuing to address him formally, as she always did. "It's buy and sell. Everything we get we pay for in one way or another. Even if we took power out of the air by our overhead motors, we'd pay for that, one way or another—nothing comes from nothing—we pay, we pay all the time, Mr. Rawn!"
 
"You don't need to go into theories and generalizations," said he testily. "We've had enough of that from him. We are both practical. You simply get that man and bring him back into the fold, that's all! Do your share."
 
 
 
 
V
 
"My share? It's easy, isn't it?" She smiled at him again annoyingly.
 
"But you can do it?"
 
"Yes, I can do it. But I can't evade the truth I just told you. I'd have to pay. You'd have to pay."
 
"We're beggars, and can't choose," said John Rawn savagely. "Besides, there's no harm done—I'm not asking you to do anything improper, anything to compromise yourself—but get him, that's all! And when we've got him in hand—when I know what I want to know—I'll wring him dry and throw him on the scrap heap. That's what I'll do with him!"
 
"Yes, I think you would," she said.
 
"It's the only right thing to do," Rawn fumed. "He'll get what's coming to him. He's been throwing down his one best friend."
 
"Are there any best friends in business, Mr. Rawn?" she asked.
 
"Of course there are. Haven't I been a friend to him; haven't I got a lot of friends of my own?"
 
"What would they do for you to-morrow, Mr. Rawn?"
 
"Well, that's a different matter; they might take care of themselves—I would take care of myse............