As he sat at his desk late that afternoon in his office looking out into Third Street, where a hurrying of brokers, messengers, and anxious depositors still maintained, he had the feeling that so far as Philadelphia and the life here was concerned, his day and its day with him was over.  He did not care anything about the brokerage business here any more or anywhere.  Failures such as this, and disasters such as the Chicago fire, that had overtaken him two years before, had cured him of all love of the stock exchange and all feeling for Philadelphia.  He had been very unhappy here in spite of all his previous happiness; and his experience as a convict had made, him, he could see quite plainly, unacceptable to the element with whom he had once hoped to associate.  There was nothing else to do, now that he had reestablished himself as a Philadelphia business man and been pardoned for an offense which he hoped to make people believe he had never committed, but to leave Philadelphia to seek a new world.

“If I get out of this safely,” he said to himself, “this is the end.  I am going West, and going into some other line of business.”  He thought of street-railways, land speculation, some great manufacturing project of some kind, even mining, on a legitimate basis.

“I have had my lesson,” he said to himself, finally getting up and preparing to leave.  “I am as rich as I was, and only a little older.  They caught me once, but they will not catch me again.”  He talked to Wingate about following up the campaign on the lines in which he had started, and he himself intended to follow it up with great energy; but all the while his mind was running with this one rich thought:  “I am a millionaire.  I am a free man.  I am only thirty-six, and my future is all before me.”

It was with this thought that he went to visit Aileen, and to plan for the future.

It was only three months later that a train, speeding through the mountains of Pennsylvania and over the plains of Ohio and Indiana, bore to Chicago and the West the young financial aspirant who, in spite of youth and wealth and a notable vigor of body, was a solemn, conservative speculator as to what his future might be.  The West, as he had carefully calculated before leaving, held much.  He had studied the receipts of the New York Clearing House recently and the disposition of bank-balances and the shipment of gold, and had seen that vast quantities of the latter metal were going to Chicago.  He understood finance accurately.  The meaning of gold shipments was clear.  Where money was going trade was—­a thriving, developing life.  He wished to see clearly for himself what this world had to offer.