The Argosy — page 101: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

S6 ln the Dead of Night. ‘ Dering. Edith, and she alone, had power to charm away the cloud | rom off his brow, the shadow from off his heart. For the time being, all his troubles and anxieties were forgotten. For a little while, when with her, he would seem like the Lionel Dering of other days: buoyant, hopeful, full of energy, and glad with the promise of the happy future before him. But when he had kissed her and said good-night, long before he reached Park Newton, the cloud would be back again as deep as before. The burden which, as he firmly believed, had been laid upon his shoulders seemed to grow heavier from day to day. “Oh that I could cast it from me!” he would often say to himself with a sort of anguish. ‘Why did I not go to the other side of the world at first? There peace and obscurity would have been mine. But it is too late now—too late!” CHAPTER XXV. MRS. MACDERMOT WANTS HER MONEY. SQUIRE CULPEPPER was laid up with an attack of his old enemy the gout. Thereby his temper was by no means improved. But to the ordinary ~ pains which attend podagra was superadded another source of irritation and alarm. The shares of the Alcazar Silver Mining Company, in which promising speculation the Squire had invested the whole of his savings, had of late been going down slowly but steadily in the market. It was altogether unaccountable. They had no sooner reached the high-water point of value than they began to fall. But the difficulty had been to know when the high-water mark was reached. The Squire had bought at a low figure—at a remarkably low figure—and when, subsequently, the shares had risen so tremendously in value, he had often been tempted to sell out and realize. But the temptation to keep holding on, in the hope of being able to realize still larger profits, had hitherto proved the stronger of the two. At first he had looked upon the decline as being merely one of those ordinary market fluctuations such as even the best securities are liable to at times. But at length he took alarm and wrote to his friend Mr. Bird, the secretary of the company, and the man who had persuaded him to invest so heavily in Alcazar securities. To the Squire’s letter Mr. Bird replied as under : ‘My dear Mr. Culpepper,—Your note of yesterday did not surprise me in the least. I quite expected to hear from you some days ago respecting the fall in Alcazars. Several other shareholders have either written to me or seen me on the same subject. The truth is that the partisans of a rival company (a company, be it said, whose shares have never yet risen to par and are never likely to do so) have been doing heir best to injure us by spreading abroad a report that a sudden rruption of water had put a stop to all our workings for an indefinite Gomicbooks.co