“Stop, Jim, for God’s sake, don’t say that to me.  My cup is full now.  Don’t tell me I am to have that crime on my soul.”  He thought a moment.  “I don’t know whether you mean it, Jim, but I can take no chances, not for all the money in the world, not even for revenge.  Wait here, Jim.”  He yelled for his brokers, and several rushed to him from different parts of the room.  He sent them back into the crowd while he dashed for the Amalgamated-pole.  The day was saved.

Presently he came back to me.  “Jim, I must have a talk with you.  Come over to my office.”  When we got there he turned the key and stood in front of me.  His great eyes looked full into mine.  In college days, gazing into their brown depths, by some magic I seemed to see the heroes and heroines of always happy-ending tales, as the child sees enchanted creatures far back in the burning Yule log flames.  But there were no joyous beings in the haunted depths of Bob’s eyes that day.

“Jim, you gave me an awful scare,” he said brokenly.  “Don’t ever do it again.  I have little left to live for.  To be sure I have some feeling for mother, Fred, and sisters.  But for you I have a love second only to that I should have felt for Beulah had I been allowed to have her.  The thought, Jim, that I had wrecked your life, with all you have to live for, would have been the last straw.  My life is purgatory.  Beulah is only an ever-present curse to me—­a ghost that rends my heart and soul, one minute with a blind frenzy to revenge her wrongs, the next with an icy remorse that I have not already done so.  If I did not have her, perhaps in time I could forget; perhaps I might lay out some scheme to help poor devils whose poverty makes life unendurable, and with the millions I have taken from that main shaft of hell I might do things that would at least bring quiet to my soul; but it is impossible with the living corpse of Beulah Sands before me every minute and that devil machinery whirling in my brain all the time the song, ‘Revenge her and her father, revenge yourself.’  It is impossible to give it up, Jim.  I must have revenge.  I must stop this machinery that is smashing up more American hearts and souls each year than all the rest of earth’s grinders combined.  Every day I delay I become more fiendish in my desires.  Jim, don’t think I do not know that I have literally turned into a fiend.  Whenever of late I see myself in the mirror, I shudder.  When I think of what I was when your father stood us up in his office and started us in this heart-shrivelling, soul-callousing business, and what I am now, I cannot keep the madness down except with rum.  You know what it means for me to say this, me who started with all the pride of a Brownley; but it is so, Jim.  The other night I went home with my soul frozen with thoughts of the past and with my brain ablaze with rum, intending to end it all.  I got out my revolver, and woke Beulah, but as I said, ‘Bob is going to kill Beulah and himself,’ she laughed that sweet