to put sugar on the free list.  The people will read that in the morning, and probably the day after they’ll be told that the committee held another session to-night and unanimously reported to take it off the free list.  By that time these honourable statesmen will have loaded up with the stock that you and I and Beulah Sands sold, and that other poor devils will slaughter to-morrow after reading their morning papers.”

Bob’s bitterness was terrible.  My heart was torn as I listened.  He stalked through the office and into that of Beulah Sands.  I followed.  She was at her desk, and when she looked up, her great eyes opened in wonderment as they took in Bob, his grim, set face, the defiant, sullen desperation of the big brown eyes, the dishevelled hair and clothes.  For an instant she stood as one who had seen an apparition.

“Look me over, Beulah Sands,” he said, “look me over to your heart’s content, for you may never again see the fool of fools in all the world, the fool who thought himself competent to cope with men of brains, with men who really know how to play the game of dollars as it is played in this Christian age.  Don’t ask me not to call you Beulah; that what I tried to do was for you is the one streak of light in all this black hell.  Beulah, Beulah, we are ruined, you, your father, and I, ruined, and I’m the fool who did it.”

She rose from her desk with all the quiet, calm dignity that we had been admiring for three months, and stood facing Bob.  She did not seem to see me; she saw nothing but the man who had gone out that morning the personification of hope, who now stood before her the picture of black despair, and she must have thought, “It was all for me.”  Suddenly she took the lapels of his torn coat in either hand.  She had to reach up to do it, this winsome little Virginia lady.  With her big calm blue eyes looking straight into his, she said: 

“Bob.”

That was all, but the word seemed to change the very atmosphere in the room.  The look of desperation faded from Bob’s face, and as though the words had sprung the hidden catch to the doors of his storehouse of pent-up misery, his eyes filled with hot, blinding tears.  His great chest was convulsed with sobs.  Again—­clear, calm, fearless, and tender, came the one syllable, “Bob.”  And at that Bob’s self-control slipped the leash.  With a hoarse cry, he threw his arms around her and crushed her to his breast.  The sacredness of the scene made me feel like an intruder, and I started to leave the room.  But in a moment Beulah Sands was her usual self and, turning to me, she said:  “Mr. Randolph, please forget what you have seen.  For an instant, as I saw Mr. Brownley’s awful misery, I thought of nothing but what he had done for me, what he had tried to do for my father, what a penalty he has paid.  From what you said when you left and the fact that I got no word from either of you, I feared the worst and did not dare look at