"Lord, help me; I am sinking in deep waters." And Winny added: "Savior of my mother, I am sick of sin; take me out of myself and into thee."
When they arose Theodore stole quietly from the room and left them alone. He went up to his own closet and prayed such prayer of thanksgiving as was recorded in heaven that night, and the angels around the throne had great joy.
Not yet were the shocks and changes coming to these households over. Not two weeks had the millionaire been sleeping his last sleep, when there burst like a bombshell on the business world the startling news that his millions had vanished into vapor, or perhaps it would be speaking more properly to say into poison. Strange, wild speculations, that the acute, far-sighted business man would never have touched for a moment had he been himself, had been entered into while his brain was struggling with the fumes of brandy. Notes had been signed, sales had been made and debts contracted upon an enormous scale; in short, the whole business was in a bewildering entanglement.
"There won't be five thousand dollars left out of the whole immense property," said Edgar Ryan, one of the lawyers in charge, at the close of a confidential conversation with Theodore, and Theodore, like the rest of the world, stood for a little stunned and aghast over this new calamity.
"I never saw such a tangle in all my days," continued Ryan, earnestly. "The amount of property shipwrecked is almost incredible. The man was never intoxicated in his life, and yet it may be truthfully said of him that he has let rum swallow all his millions. I tell you, Mallery, you and Habakkuk were undoubtedly correct."
Theodore turned and walked soberly and wearily away. He had not the heart just then to smile over the memory of anything. There followed weary, anxious, harassing days—days in which Pliny remained doggedly behind the counter, and Theodore almost entirely ignored the store, and gave himself up to following the footsteps of appraisers and auctioneers and policemen, and in trying to shield Mrs. Hastings and Dora, for the red flag floated out from the grand mansion proudly known for years as Hastings' Hall. Oh change! Can anything in all time be compared in swiftness and sharpness and terror to that monster who swoops down upon our hearts and homes, and almost in the twinkling of an eye leaves them desolate? Oh heaven! With all its glories and its joys, can anything in all the bright description equal in peace and rest and comfort that one precious sentence which admits of no thought of change: "And they shall reign forever and ever?"
There were plans innumerable to be made and acted upon. Rick and his wife had gone back ere this to their Western home. Winny had steadily refused their urgent petitions to accompany them, and worked faithfully on in her honored position in one of the great graded schools. She and Jim had taken board together in a quiet house as far removed from the dear old home as possible. Mrs. Hastings had promptly accepted the invitation of her husband's brother in Chicago. The invitation had also been extended to Dora, and she had as promptly declined it. Her strong, independent nature asserted itself here. She would not go to live a dependent in her uncle's home. She would not teach music, for which she pronounced herself unfitted by nature and education; but she would take the boys' room next to Winny's in the aforesaid graded school, and share the quiet little room in the boarding house, whither Winny had carried many of her household treasures.
It was all settled at last, and when Mrs. Hastings was ticketed and checked for Chicago under the escort of one of the firm who was going thither, and the young ladies were quietly domiciled in their new and pleasant room, Pliny and Theodore came to the first breathing place they had found for many a day, and felt absolutely forlorn and disconsolate. They were together in the store, the last clerk had departed, and their loneliness only served to add to their sense of gloom.