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Mechanically, through mere habit, he lifted the receiver.

The voice over the telephone came in brisk, staccato sentences.

“That letter I sent this morning? Forget it. Tear it up. I’ve been thinking and I’m going to take a chance. I’ve decided to back you boys, and I know you’ll make good. I’m speaking from a road-house in the Bronx; going straight from here to the bank. So you can begin to draw against us within an hour. And–hello!–will three millions see you through?”

From Wall Street there came no answer, but from the hands of the barkeeper a glass crashed to the floor.

The young man regarded the barkeeper with puzzled eyes.

“He doesn’t answer,” he exclaimed. “He must have hung up.”

“He must have fainted!” said the barkeeper.

The white-haired one pushed a bill across the counter. “To pay for breakage,” he said, and disappeared down Pelham Parkway.

Throughout the day, with the bill, for evidence, pasted against the mirror, the barkeeper told and retold the wondrous tale.

“He stood just where you’re standing now,” he related, “blowing in million-dollar bills like you’d blow suds off a beer. If I’d knowed it was him, I’d have hit him once and hid him in the cellar for the reward. Who’d I think he was? I thought he was a wire-tapper, working a con game!”

Mr. Carroll had not “hung up,” but when in the Bronx the beer-glass crashed, in Wall Street the receiver had slipped from the hand of the man who held it, and the man himself had fallen forward. His desk hit him in the face and woke him–woke him to the wonderful fact that he still lived; that at forty he had been born again; that before him stretched many more years in which, as the young man with the white hair had pointed out, he still could make good.

The afternoon was far advanced when the staff of Carroll and Hastings were allowed to depart, and, even late as was the hour, two of them were asked to remain. Into the most private of the private offices Carroll invited Gaskell, the head clerk; in the main office Hastings had asked young Thorne, the bond clerk, to be seated.

Until the senior partner has finished with Gaskell young Thorne must remain seated.

“Gaskell,” said Mr. Carroll, “if we had listened to you, if we’d run this place as it was when father was alive, this never would have happened. It hasn’t happened, but we’ve had our lesson. And after this we’re going slow and going straight. And we don’t need you to tell us how to do that. We want you to go away–on a month’s vacation. When I thought we were going under I planned to send the children on a sea voyage with the governess–so they wouldn’t see the newspapers. But now that I can look them in the eye again, I need them, I can’t let them go. So, if you’d like to take your wife on an ocean trip to Nova Scotia and Quebec, here are the cabins I reserved for the kids. They call it the royal suite–whatever that is–and the trip lasts a month. The boat sails to-morrow morning. Don’t sleep too late or you may miss her.”

The head clerk was secreting the tickets in the inside pocket of his waistcoat. His fingers trembled, and when he laughed his voice trembled.

“Miss the boat!” the head clerk exclaimed. “If she gets away from Millie and me she’s got to start now. We’ll go on board to-night!”

A half-hour later Millie was on her knees packing a trunk, and her husband was telephoning to the drug-store for a sponge-bag and a cure for seasickness.

Owing to the joy in her heart and to the fact that she was on her knees, Millie was alternately weeping into the trunk-tray and offering up incoherent prayers of thanksgiving. Suddenly she sank back upon the floor.