With his arm around her he led her across the threshold, and then, closing that door, he came back and opened the other.

The man who half-stepped, half-stumbled in staggered to the desk chair and dropped into it to raise a face in which the eyes burned wildly.  The whole figure shook in an ague of unnerved excitement.  He spread two trembling hands and tragically announced, “I’m ruined.”

Edwardes nodded gravely.  “You need a physician, Fairley.  You’re unstrung,” he suggested.  “Perhaps a drop of brandy would help.  I think I have some here.”

“No!” the reply was violent, and the President of the Metallic National shook his head with the uncontrolled air of a man who is close to the border of insanity.  “No, by God, I’m past physicians.  What I need next is an undertaker.”  He dropped his head to the desk and broke into a crazed storm of weak sobs.

“There is no profit in wild talk,” his host reminded him.  “I’m ruined, too.  We must make a fresh start.”

“Fresh start, hell!” The words rang queerly through the accompaniment of a bitter laugh.  “Hamilton Burton took me and squeezed me dry.  He put the thumbscrews on me and bled me of my Coal and Ore stock.  He made me a traitor to Malone and today when Malone might have saved me I had no friends.  Then because you sought to befriend me, Burton turned on me and ruined me.  My family will be in the streets.  Now—­” the voice rose into a high treble of frenzy which penetrated to the room where Mary Burton waited—­“I’m going to kill Hamilton Burton first and myself next.”

With the wild threat the banker rose unsteadily and his palsied hand went into his overcoat pocket, to come out clutching a magazine pistol which he brandished before him.

Edwardes’ first thought was to seize the wrist, but the breadth of the table intervened and he knew that he was dealing with a man of temporarily dethroned reason.  So he held the wild and shifting gaze, as well as he could, with the cool steadiness of his own eyes and spoke in a measured, soothing voice: 

“I shouldn’t do that, Fairley.  In the first place you don’t know where to find him.  Your effort would probably fail and you would only be locked up before you accomplished either purpose.”

The noise of the outer offices had drowned the visitor’s excited tones among the employees, but to Mary Burton, standing anxiously in the conference-room, all the words were intelligible.

Fairley leaned across the table, and for an instant left the weapon unguarded.  With a movement of cat-like swiftness Edwardes seized it, but a wild snarl of rage burst from the other’s lips and his fingers closed vise-like over Jefferson’s hand.

“No—­by God—­you don’t!” he screamed.

Mary Burton threw open the door, and saw the two figures bent across the table with four hands desperately gripped while between them glinted the blued metal of the pistol, which the frustrated Fairley was striving to turn upon his own breast and Edwardes struggled to divert.