Page:The Baron of Diamond Tail (1923).pdf/252

 His hand trembled on her arm; it was damp with the sweat of an agony she could not fathom as she took it to guide him to a chair.

"Sit by the window—it seems close in here tonight."

"I feel an oppression in the air," said he. "It seems heavy, as if a storm might be gathering."

He sat by the open window, silent for a little while, as a weary man come home to his repose. A gust of wind, little more than a breath, rustled the leaves, and shook down a shower of them from the maple and aspen boughs with sound as melancholy as his own sighs.

"The business is going badly, Alma," Nearing said at last, catching himself in his drifting, it seemed, coming back by sheer force to the subject he had sought her to discuss.

"But that's not news, Uncle Hal. The business has been going badly a long time, hasn't it?"

"A long time. Now it's rushing to a fall, I'll be overwhelmed, buried in the ruins that will drag all of us down. You are the only one that can stop this avalanche—I've come to appeal to you."

"I stop it?" she asked, amazed. "Why, Uncle Hal"

"Your interest as a stockholder"

"Oh!" she stopped him impatiently. "I forgot, long ago, that I was a stockholder, I threw my chips in with yours, I count my little inheritance swallowed up in the loss you've stood. You've repaid me, a thousand times over, Uncle Hal. As a stockholder, don't count me in."