"There--there," she said, in the comforting mother-tone. "It will be all right. You can't do anything to-night. It's after ten o'clock."
He gave a groan.
"The markets will go to smash in the morning unless we get ready for them to-night. It's all up," he moaned. "It was all in my head, and it's all gone. There'll be a smash in the market to-morrow, and I can't help it." Then he broke into passionate sobbing, while Laura Kendrick knelt over him, wiped away his tears, and made above him those murmuring sounds with which the mother comforts the hurt child.
It was with something of the awe with which one meets the earthquake that I witnessed the collapse of the fortitude and self-control in Wharton Kendrick. The foundations of the earth seemed breaking up when I saw this type of self-reliant manhood whimpering and weeping like a whipped schoolboy.
Doctor Roberts had been attending to Danny Regan of the broken leg, but he now returned to his more demonstrative patient.
"Come, come," he said in his most cheerful professional tone. "This is no way to get well. If you want to be out to-morrow, you must be quiet." And he motioned us away.
"It's all going to smash--I can hear it going," sobbed Kendrick, "and I can't remember what to do." He lay looking anxiously from side to side and repeated over and over, "I can't remember what to do."
As Doctor Roberts motioned us away again, I took him aside.
"Is there any chance of his getting down to business to-morrow?"
"Not the slightest. And he must not be excited by talking of it."