CHAPTER XXII

A GREAT GUN IN FINANCE IS UNLIMBERED

WHEN J. Percival Dunbar awoke the morning following his afternoon with Mabel Stanford in Prospect Park, it was with an uneasy sense, as if a heavy burden were resting upon him.

He lay still to consider to determine what it was—what had caused it. It ought not to be because of Mabel, he thought. As a matter of fact, their relations had not changed. Indeed, they had been deepened and strengthened, but wholly on the same lines. He had been assured before that Mabel loved him. The outcome of the ride with her had been to make stronger his conviction. To be sure, she had been somewhat hysterical in her admissions. It was clear that she had been trying to train herself not to love him, but, as a result of his recital of his battle for her, she had abandoned all pretense of the struggle against her love. She had told him she had submitted. So, marriage must be the logical consequence. It was true that she was yet pleading for de

lay. But all that was due to her morbid fear of scandal as to herself and its effect on him. Marriage was the logical consequence, and he would lose nothing by yielding to her plea for postponement of answer. It must come in the end. He had told her so when they were parting for the day at her house, and she was striving to express her doubts as to the propriety of accepting so costly and conspicuous a gift as the pair of blooded horses and the fine carriage.

"If you do not accept the gift," he had said, "it will be saying no as the answer to my Saratoga question. And that, I tell you, you are not prepared to do. There can be but one answer. And you will make it. That will be yes.

"I fear," she had urged, "that it will make gossip will be misapprehended."

"Then you must wear on your finger another gift that will be an explanation.”

And he had gone away after this, the horses and carriage having been driven to her stable. So, on a review of it all, his uneasy sense could not be because of Mabel. He turned to the events of the directors' meeting. Those events, in themselves, were not so weighty. They had rested on his mind, it now appeared, because they had seemed pregnant with a meaning that had been concealed from him.

So he gradually reached the conclusion that the uneasy feeling which he had taken as a warning was apprehension—the apprehension of the unknown. He chafed under this and made a determination. He would seek Mr. Anstruthers early, assume the aggressive, demand to know the meaning of the extraordinary tactics of Mr. Raab-while pointing out his loyalty to the alliance when he was in a position of absolute control. And with this determination settled he dressed for the day.

But on reaching his office all his plans were overturned. He found a personal letter from Henry Morton. He was called to a conference. The letter was to the effect that it were better that this conference should take. place at another place than the financier's banking house, and so he asked Percy to dine with him at his residence that evening. Percy laid the letter down, and thought hard. Evidently the mystery that had perplexed him for twentyfour hours was to be revealed. And it was to be revealed secretly. That being the case, under all the circumstances, he did not want to go to Mr. Anstruthers until he knew what this cherished and mysterious plan of the great financier was. And if he did not want to go to Mr. Anstruthers he did not want Mr. Anstruthers to come to him in the meantime, or to be summoned to a conference with Mr.

Raab. This consideration drove him out of his office. He summoned Frank Elbert, who, though he had assumed his duties as treasurer, was yet acting as secretary to him, and told him that he should be away the most of the day.

"I do not suppose, Frank," he said, "that your elevation to the position of treasurer has diminished your loyalty to me?"

"If I thought you could really think so, or that I could be so ungrateful as to be tempted into an act of disloyalty to you, I would resign from Universal now," said Frank.

"Your sense of gratitude, my dear Frank," replied Percy, "will be severely tested in the days to come, no doubt. But I do not think you disloyal, and shall put my faith in you now. I leave the office so that I cannot meet Mr. Anstruthers, Mr. Raab or any of that group to-day. I am to meet Mr. Morton this evening about what I do not now know. I do not want to meet those people or talk to them until I know what Mr. Morton wants."

He went out of the office with the sense of running away, of hiding, and it recalled the days when he had played truant from school. He went to his uncle, Mr. Wiswall.

When Percy reached his uncle he was not well pleased to find Joe Hackett with Mr. Wiswall, not that he did not want to meet Joe,

but that he did not want him to know that he was there at that particular time.

"Come in, Percy," cried Mr. Wiswall, "and defend your order from the assaults of this radical depurator. Here is Hackett in the most incendiary manner denouncing those who get rich quick as a class."

"Oh, I know!" replied Percy, lightly. "That's Joe's metier. Up with poverty! Down with wealth! Eh, Joe?"

"You know very well, Percy," replied Joe, "that I hold no such opinions."

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'And yet, if I mistook you not," urged Mr. Wiswall, "you said a short time ago that no one ever made in one lifetime more than $2,000,000 honestly."

"I said I would venture that, judged by a rigid code of morals, right and justice, no man acquired in a lifetime more than $2,000,000 honestly—that is, without having done someone an injustice of which he was conscious."

"You are in the class, Percy," said his uncle mischievously. "You've made three million dollars in less than a tenth part of a lifetime."

“Yes, I am in the class, according to Saint Joe," said Percy.

"That was a nasty sneer, Percy," coolly replied Joe. "I am no saint, and do not set up