“I will drive you to the hotel by way of the stables, and you can go at once to your room and change your clothes.  You are tired, you are nervous and worried, and want rest.  Don’t tell me anything now until you feel quite yourself again.”

He whipped up the horse, who, recognizing another hand at the reins, lunged forward in a final effort, and in a few minutes they were at the hotel.

As Mrs. Horncastle sat at luncheon in the great dining-room, a little pale and abstracted, she saw Mrs. Barker sweep confidently into the room, fresh, rosy, and in a new and ravishing toilette.  With a swift glance of conscious power towards the other guests she walked towards Mrs. Horncastle.  “Ah, here you are, dear,” she said in a voice that could easily reach all ears, “and you’ve arrived only a little before me, after all.  And I’ve had such an awful drive to the Divide!  And only think! poor George telegraphed to me at Boomville not to worry, and his dispatch has only just come back here.”

And with a glance of complacency she laid Barker’s gentle and forgiving dispatch before the astonished Mrs. Horncastle.

CHAPTER VIII.

As the day advanced the excitement over the financial crisis increased at Hymettus, until, in spite of its remote and peaceful isolation, it seemed to throb through all its verandas and corridors with some pulsation from the outer world.  Besides the letters and dispatches brought by hurried messengers and by coach from the Divide, there was a crowd of guests and servants around the branch telegraph at the new Heavy Tree post-office which was constantly augmenting.  Added to the natural anxiety of the deeply interested was the stimulated fever of the few who wished to be “in the fashion.”  It was early rumored that a heavy operator, a guest of the hotel, who was also a director in the telegraph company, had bought up the wires for his sole use, that the dispatches were doctored in his interests as a “bear,” and there was wild talk of lynching by the indignant mob.  Passengers from Sacramento, San Francisco, and Marysville brought incredible news and the wildest sensations.  Firm after firm had failed in the great cities.  Old established houses that dated back to the “spring of ’49,” and had weathered the fires and inundations of their perilous Californian infancy, collapsed before this mysterious, invisible, impalpable breath of panic.  Companies rooted in respectability and sneered at for old-fashioned ways were discovered to have shamelessly speculated with trusts!  An eminent deacon and pillar of the church was found dead in his room with a bullet in his heart and a damning confession on the desk before him!  Foreign bankers were sending their gold out of the country; government would be appealed to to open the vaults of the Mint; there would be an embargo on all bullion shipment!  Nothing was too wild or preposterous to be repeated or credited.