There are some men whose mission in life it appears to be to go aboutthe world creating crises in the lives of other people. When there isthunder in the air they precipitate the thunderbolt.

　　Bailey Bannister was one of these. He meant extraordinarily well, buthe was a dangerous man for that very reason, and in a properlyconstituted world would have been segregated or kept under supervision.

　　He would not leave the tangled lives of those around him to adjustthemselves. He blundered in and tried to help. He nearly alwaysproduced a definite result, but seldom the one at which he aimed.

　　That he should have interfered in the affairs of Ruth and Kirk at thistime was, it must be admitted, unselfish of him, for just now he washaving troubles of his own on a somewhat extensive scale. His wife'sextravagance was putting a strain on his finances, and he was facedwith the choice of checking her or increasing his income. Being verymuch in love, he shrank from the former task and adopted the other wayout of the difficulty.

　　It was this that had led to the change in his manner noticed by Steve.

　　In order to make more money he had had to take risks, and only recentlyhad he begun to perceive how extremely risky these risks were. For thefirst time in its history the firm of Bannister was making first-handacquaintance with frenzied finance.

　　It is, perhaps, a little unfair to lay the blame for this entirely atthe door of Bailey's Sybil. Her extravagance was largely responsible;but Bailey's newly found freedom was also a factor in the developmentsof the firm's operations. If you keep a dog, a dog with a high sense ofhis abilities and importance, tied up and muzzled for a length of timeand then abruptly set it free the chances are that it will celebrateits freedom. This had happened in the case of Bailey.

　　Just as her father's money had caused Ruth to plunge into a whirl ofpleasures which she did not really enjoy, merely for the novelty of it,so the death of John Bannister and his own consequent accession to thethrone had upset Bailey's balance and embarked him on an orgy ofspeculation quite foreign to his true nature. All their lives Ruth andBailey had been repressed by their father, and his removal hadunsteadied them.

　　Bailey, on whom the shadow of the dead man had pressed particularlyseverely, had been quite intoxicated by sudden freedom. He had been acipher in the firm of Bannister & Son. In the firm of Bannister & Co.

　　he was an untrammelled despot. He did that which was right in his owneyes, and there was no one to say him nay.

　　It was true that veteran members of the firm, looking in the glass,found white hairs where no white hairs had been and wrinkles onforeheads which, under the solid rule of old John Bannister, had beensmooth; but it would have taken more than these straws to convinceBailey that the wind which was blowing was an ill-wind. He haddeveloped in a day the sublime self-confidence of a young Napoleon. Hewas all dash and enterprise--the hurricane fighter of Wall Street.