Armstrong struggled to his feet. He swayed, caught at the desk, gathered himself together.
"Nothing to do, Evarts," he said, mumbling the words miserably. "Nothing to do. I'm sick. Let me get out of here—"
Somehow he took his hat and coat and got out of the room, which had suddenly become hateful to him.
CHAPTER III
Armstrong went to his hotel room and dropped into a chair. He felt the need of being alone. He was glad that Dorothy was in Evansville, ignorant of all this disaster. He wanted no sympathy, no loving touch; he was in too bitter a mood.
The hours following his interview with Macgowan were the darkest of his life. Now that it was all over, the reaction hit him hard. The absolute and deliberate falseness of his most trusted friend was so deadly and incredible that his brain was slow to waken. This wormwood was a drug, numbing all his senses save that of inward torture. Every thought of Macgowan was a new stab.
Financially he was little injured; the blow went deeper. He was stripped of all interest in Consolidated. Everything to which he had given his energy and thought was lifted out of his grasp. He was left with nothing. To all that body of nearly sixteen thousand investors whose confidence had so inflated his pride—he was now less than nothing.
Dorothy's warning recurred to him, wrenched a wondering groan from his spirit. How those clear, cool eyes of her had pierced to the rotten heart of Macgowan! If he had only heeded it—if he had only received it sooner! Armstrong dropped his face in his hands, fighting desperately if unavailingly for a foothold on sanity, for a clear brain. He could find no outstanding point, nothing on which to build; tumult and chaos still engulfed him, and the will to do was dead. He could think only of Lawrence Macgowan, and his soul was plunged into a frightful despair.
Slowly he realized what he had lost; slowly he came to a comprehension of how this astounding treachery had won the fight against him. Now that everything was finished, he could by degrees perceive what a frightful act of folly he had that morning committed. With a perfectly clean conscience, with nothing whatever to fear—why, why had he not made some semblance of a fight? His act in signing those papers had been the act of a coward, a fool! He shivered at thought of himself that morning, shivered at the remembrance of what he had passed through.