IN the noon hour of the following day was enacted the brief final scene in the drama of the “Rubber Consols corner.”

For long weeks, Mr. Stormont Thorpe had given much thought to this approaching climax of his great adventure—looking forward to it both as the crowning event of his life, and as the dawn of a new existence in some novel, enchanted world. It was to bring his triumph, and even more, his release. It was at once to crown him as a hero and chieftain among City men, and transfigure him into a being for whom all City things were an abomination. In his waking hours, the conflict between these aims did not specially force itself upon his attention: he mused upon, and spun fancies about, either one indifferently, and they seemed not at all irreconcilable. But his dreams were full of warfare,—wearily saturated with strife, and endless endeavour to do things which could not be done, and panic-stricken terrors before the shadow of shapeless calamities,—until he dreaded to go to sleep. Then he discovered that an extra two glasses of whiskey-and-water would solve that particular difficulty, and send him into prompt, leaden slumber—but the early mornings remained as torturing as ever. In the twilight he awoke oppressed and sick at heart with gloom—and then dozed at intervals through fantastic new ordeals of anguish and shame and fear, till it was decently possible to get up.

Then, indeed, the big cold sponge on his head and spine scattered these foolish troubles like chaff, and restored to him his citizenship among the realities. He dressed with returning equanimity, and was almost cheerful by the time he thrust his razor into the hot water. Yet increasingly he was conscious of the wear and strain of it all, and increasingly the date, September twelfth, loomed before him with a portentous individuality of its own.

This day grew to mean so much more to him than had all the other days of the dead years together that he woke in the darkness of its opening hours, and did not get satisfactorily to sleep again. His vigil, however, was for the once free from grief. He drowsily awaited the morning in vague mental comfort; he had recurring haphazard indolent glimpses of a protecting fact standing guard just outside the portals of consciousness—the fact that the great day was here. He rose early, breakfasted well, and walked by the Embankment to the City, where at ten he had a few words with Semple, and afterward caused himself to be denied to ordinary callers. He paced up and down the Board Room for the better part of the ensuing two hours, luxuriating in the general sense of satisfaction in the proximity of the climax, rather than pretending to himself that he was thinking out its details. He had provided in his plans of the day for a visit from Messrs. Rostocker and Aronson, which should constitute the dramatic finale of the “corner,” and he looked forward to this meeting with a certain eagerness of expectation. Yet even here he thought broadly of the scene as a whole, and asked himself no questions about words and phrases. It seemed to be taken for granted in his mind that the scene itself would be theatrically impressive, even spectacular.

In the event, this long-awaited culmination proved to be disappointingly flat and commonplace. It was over before Thorpe had said any considerable proportion of the things he saw afterward that he had intended to say. The two men came as he had expected they would—and they bought their way out of the tragic “corner” at precisely the price he had nominated in his mind. But hardly anything else went as he had dimly prefigured it.

Mr. Rostocker was a yellow-haired man, and Mr. Aronson was as dark as a Moor, and no physical resemblance of features or form suggested itself to the comparing eye, yet Thorpe even now, when they stood brusquely silent before him, with their carefully-brushed hats pulled down over their eyes, stuck to it in his own mind that it was hard to tell them apart. To the end, there was something impersonal in his feeling toward them. They, for their part, coldly abstained from exhibiting a sign of feeling about him, good, bad, or indifferent.

It was the man with the fair hair and little curly flaxen beard who spoke: “How do you do! I understand that we can buy eight thousand five hundred Rubber Consols from you at \'twenty-three.\'”

“No—twenty-five,” replied Thorpe.

The dark man spoke: “The jobbers\' price is twenty-three.”

“To carry over—yes,” Thorpe answered. “But to buy it is twenty-five.”

The two sons of the race which invented mental arithmetic exchanged an alert glance, and looked at the floor for an engrossed instant.

“I don\'t mind telling you,” Thorpe interposed upon their silence, “I put on that extra two pounds because you got up that story about applying to the Stock Exchange Committee on a charge of fraud.”

“We didn\'t get up any story,” said Rostocker, curtly.

“You tried to plant it on us,” Aronson declared.

“One of your own Directors put it about. I thought it was a fake at the time.”

This view of the episode took Thorpe by surprise. As it seemed, in passing, to involve a compliment to his own strategic powers, he accepted it without comment. “Well—it is twenty-five, anyway,” he told them, with firmness.

“Twenty-four,” suggested Aronson, after another momentary pause.

“Not a shilling less than twenty-five,” Thorpe insisted, with quiet doggedness.

“We can always pay our creditors and let you whistle,” Rostocker reminded him, laconically.

“You can do anything you like,” was the reply, “except buy Rubber Consols under twenty-five. It doesn\'t matter a fig to me whether you go bankrupt or not. It would suit me as well to have you two \'hammered\' as to take your money.” Upon the spur of a sudden thought he drew out his watch. “In just two minutes\' time to a tick, the price will be thirty.”

“Let\'s be \'hammered\' then!” said Aronson to his companion, with simulated impulsiveness.

Rostocker was the older and stronger man, and when at last he spoke it was with the decision of one in authority. “It is your game,” he said, with grave imperturbability. “Eight thousand five hundred at twenty-five. Will you deliver at the Credit Lyonnais in half an hour?”

Thorpe nodded, impassively. Then a roving idea of genial impertinence brought a gleam to his eye. “If you should happen to want more Rubber Consols at any time,” he said, with a tentative chuckle, “I could probably let you have them at a reduced price.”

The two received the pleasantry without a smile, but to Thorpe\'s astonishment one of them seemed to discern something in it beside banter. It was Rostocker who said: “Perhaps we may make a deal with you,” and apparently meant it.

They went out at this, ignoring ceremony upon their exit as stolidly as they had done upon their entrance, and a moment later Thorpe called in the Secretary, and despatched a messenger to bring Semple from Capel Court. The formalities of this final transfer of shares had been dictated to the former, and he had gone off on the business, before the Broker arrived.

Thorpe stood waiting near the door, and held out his hand with a dramatically significant gesture when the little Scotchman entered. “Put her there!” he exclaimed heartily, with an exuberant reversion to the slang of remote transatlantic bonhomie.

“Yeh\'ve done it, then!” said Semple, his sharp face softening with pleasure at the news. “Yeh\'ve pulled it off at twenty-three!”

The other\'s big countenance yielded itself to a boyish grin. “Twenty-FIVE!” he said, and laughed aloud. “After you left this morning, it kind o\' occurred to me that I\'d raise it a couple of pounds. I found I was madder about those pieces in the newspapers than I thought I was, and so I took an extra seventeen thousand pounds on that account.”

“God above!” Semple ejaculated, with a satisfaction through which signs of an earlier fright were visible. “It was touch-and-go if you didn\'t lose it all by doing that! You risked everything, man!”

Thorpe ponderously shrugged his shoulders. “Well—I did it, anyhow, and it came off,” was his comment. Then, straightening himself, he drew a long, long breath, and beamed down at the little man. “Think of it! God! It\'s actually all over! And NOW perhaps we won\'t have a drink! Hell! Let\'s send out for some champagne!” His finger was hovering over the bell, when the Broker\'s dissuading voice arrested it. “No, no!” Semple urged. “I wouldn\'t touch it. It\'s no fit drink for the daytime—and it\'s a scandal in an office. Your clerks will aye blab it about hither and yon, and nothing harms a man\'s reputation more in the City.”

“Oh, to hell with the City!” cried Thorpe, joyously. “I\'m never going to set foot in it again. Think of that! I mean it!”

None the less, he abandoned the idea of sending out for wine, and contented himself with the resources of the cabinet instead. After some friendly pressure, Semple consented to join him in a brandy-and-soda, though he continued to protest between sips that at such an hour it was an indecent practice.

“It\'s the ruin of many a strong man,” he moralized, looking rather pointedly at Thorpe over his glass. “It\'s the principal danger that besets the verra successful man. He\'s too busily occupied to take exercise, and he\'s too anxious and worried to get his proper sleep—but he can always drink! In one sense, I\'m not sorry to think that you\'re leaving the City.”

“Oh, it never hurts me,” Thorpe said, indifferently accepting the direction of the homily. “I\'m as strong as an ox. But all the same, I shall be better in every way for getting out of this hole. Thank God, I can get off to Scotland tomorrow. But I say, Semple, what\'s the matter with your visiting me at my place there? I\'ll give you the greatest shooting and fishing you ever heard of.”

The Broker was thinking of something else. “What is to be the precise position of the Company, in the immediate future?” he asked.

“Company? What Company?”

Semple smiled grimly. “Have you already forgotten that there is such a thing?” he queried, with irony. “Why, man, this Company that paid for this verra fine Board-table,” he explained, with his knuckles on its red baize centre.

Thorpe laughed amusedly. “I paid for that out of my own pocket,” he said. “For that matter everything about the Company has come out of my pocket——”

“Or gone into it,” suggested the other, and they chuckled together.

“But no—you\'re right,” Thorpe declared. “Some thing ought to be settled about the Company, I suppose. Of course I wash my hands of it—but would anybody else want to go on with it? You see its annual working expenses, merely for the office and the Board, foot up nearly 3,000 pounds. I\'ve paid these for this year, but naturally I won\'t do it again. And would it be worth anybody else\'s while to do it? Yours, for example?”

“Have you had any explanations with the other Directors?” the Broker asked, thoughtfully.

“Explanations—no,” Thorpe told him. “But that\'s all right. The Marquis has been taken care of, and so has Plowden. They\'re game to agree to anything. And let\'s see—Kervick is entirely my man. That leaves Watkin and Davidson—and they don\'t matter. They\'re mere guinea-pigs. A few hundreds apiece would shut them up, if you thought it was worth while to give them anything at all.”

“And about the property,—the rubber plantation,—that the Company was formed to acquire and develop. I suppose there really is such a plantation?”

“Oh, yes, it\'s all there right enough,” Thorpe said, briefly.

“It\'s no good, though, is it?” the Broker asked, with affable directness.

“Between ourselves, it isn\'t worth a damn,” the other blithely assured him.

The Scotchman mused with bent brows. “There ought still to be money in it,” he said, with an air of conviction.

“By the way,” it occurred to Thorpe to mention, “here\'s something I didn\'t understand. I told Rostocker here, just as a cheeky kind of joke, that after he and Aronson had got their eight thousand five hundred, if they thought they\'d like still more shares, I\'d let \'em have \'em at a bargain—and he seemed to take it seriously. He did for a fact. Said perhaps he could make a deal with me.”

“Hm-m!” said Semple, reflectively. “I\'ll see if he says anything to me. Very likely he\'s spotted some way of taking the thing over, and reorganizing it, and giving it another run over the course. I\'ll think it out. And now I must be off. Aren\'t you lunching?”

“No—I\'ll have the boy bring in some sandwiches,” Thorpe decided. “I want my next meal west of Temple Bar when I get round to it. I\'ve soured on the City for keeps.”

“I wouldn\'t say that it had been so bad to you, either,” Semple smilingly suggested, as he turned to the door.

Thorpe grinned in satisfied comment. “Hurry back as soon as you\'ve finally settled with Rostocker and the other fellow,” he called after him, and began pacing the floor again.

It was nearly four o\'clock when these two men, again together in the Board Room, and having finished the inspection of some papers on the desk, sat upright and looked at each other in tacit recognition that final words were to be spoken.

“Well, Semple,” Thorpe began, after that significant little pause............