“Well! well! Quite a little for you people to lose, eh?”

“You will have to change your tone if you remain here, Mr. Ames,” she answered quietly. “We talk only prosperity in this office.”

“Prosperity! In the face of overwhelming debts! That’s good!” he laughed.

She looked at him closely for a moment. “Debts?” she said in a low voice. “You speak of debts? You who owe your fellow-men what you can never, never repay? Why, Mr. Ames, there is no man in this whole wide world, I think, who is so terribly, hopelessly in debt as you!”

“I? My dear girl! Why, I don’t owe a dollar to any man!”

“No?” she queried, bending a little closer to him. “You do not owe Madam Beaubien the money you are daily filching from her? You do not owe poor Mr. Gannette the money and freedom of which you robbed him? You do not owe anything to the thousands of miners and mill hands who have given, and still give, their lives for you? You do not owe for the life which you took from Mrs. Hawley-Crowles? You do not owe for the souls which you have debauched in your black career? For the human wreckage which lies strewn in your wake? You do not owe Mr. Haynerd for the Social Era which you stole from him?”

Ames remained rigid and quiet while the girl spoke. And when she had finished, and they sat looking squarely into each other’s eyes, the silence was like that which comes between the sharp click of lightning and the crash of thunder which follows. If it had been a man who thus addressed him, Ames would have hurled him to the floor and trampled him. As it was, he rose slowly, like a black storm-cloud mounting above the horizon, and stood over the girl.

She looked up into his face dauntlessly and smiled. “Sit down,” she quietly said. “I’ve only begun. Don’t threaten, please,” she continued. “It wouldn’t do any good, for I am not a bit afraid of you. Sit down.”

A faint smile began to play about Ames’s mouth. Then he twitched his shoulders slightly. “I––I got up,” he said, with an assumption of nonchalance, “to––to read that––ah, that motto over there on the wall.” He went slowly to it and, stooping, read aloud:

“Lift up the weak, and cheer the strong,
Defend the truth, combat the wrong!
You’ll find no scepter like the pen
To hold and sway the hearts of men.”