“Very well!” said Lucy, “you use your own judgment.”

There was a pause; then Montague, seeing the look on Lucy’s face, started to his feet.  “It won’t do you any good to think about to-day’s mishap,” he said.  “Let’s start over again, and not make any more mistakes.  Come with me this evening.  I have some friends who have been begging me to bring you around ever since you came.”

“Who are they?” asked Lucy.

“General Prentice and his wife.  Do you know of them?”

“I have heard Mr. Ryder speak of Prentice the banker.  Is that the one you mean?”

“Yes,” said Montague,—­“the president of the Trust Company of the Republic.  He was an old comrade of my father’s, and they were the first people I met here in New York.  I have got to know them very well since.  I told them I would bring you up to dinner sometime, and I will telephone them, if you say so.  I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to sit here by yourself and think about Dan Waterman.”

“Oh, I don’t mind it now,” said Lucy.  “But I will go with you, if you like.”

* * *

They went to the Prentices’.  There were the General himself, and Mrs. Prentice, and their two daughters, one of whom was a student in college, and the other a violinist of considerable talent.  General Prentice was now over seventy, and his beard was snow-white, but he still had the erect carriage and the commanding presence of a soldier.  Mrs. Prentice Montague had first met one evening when he had been their guest at the opera, and she had impressed him as a lady with a great many diamonds, who talked to him about other people while he was trying to listen to the music.  But she was, as Lucy phrased it afterwards, “a motherly soul, when one got underneath her war-paint.”  She was always inviting Montague to her home and introducing him to people whom she thought would be of assistance to him.

Also there came that evening young Harry Curtiss, the General’s nephew.  Montague had never met him before, but he knew him as a junior partner in the firm of William E. Davenant, the famous corporation lawyer—­the man whom Montague had found opposed to him in his suit against the Fidelity Insurance Company.  Harry Curtiss, whom Montague was to know quite well before long, was a handsome fellow, with frank and winning manners.  He had met Alice Montague at an affair a week or so ago, and he sent word that he was coming to see her.

After dinner they sat and smoked, and talked about the condition of the market.  It was a time of great agitation in Wall Street.  There had been a violent slump in stocks, and matters seemed to be going from bad to worse.

“They say that Wyman has got caught,” said Curtiss, repeating one of the wild tales of the “Street.”  “I was talking with one of his brokers yesterday.”

“Wyman is not an easy man to catch,” said the General.  “His own brokers are often the last men to know his real situation.  There is good reason to believe that some of the big insiders are loaded up, for the public is very uneasy, as you know; but with the situation as it is just now in Wall Street, you can’t tell anything.  The men who are really on the inside have matters so completely in their own hands that they are practically omnipotent.”