I mustn't be alluded to in any way.
You quite understand that?"
"Trust me!" said the old man, and wrung his benefactor's hand.
It was indeed with a trustful eye that Thorpe watched
the train draw out of the station.
CHAPTER XVI
THE week following the August Bank Holiday is very rarely
indeed a busy or anxious time in the City. In the
ordinary course of things, it serves as the easy-going
prelude--with but casual and inattentive visits eastward,
and with only the most careless glances through the financial
papers--to the halcyon period of the real vacation.
Men come to the City during this week, it is true,
but their thoughts are elsewhere--on the moors, on the
blue sea, on the glacier or the fiord, or the pleasant
German pine forests.
To the great mass of City people; this August in question
began in a normal enough fashion. To one little group
of operators, however, and to the widening circle
of brokers, bankers, and other men of affairs whose
interests were more or less involved with those of
this group, it was a season of keen perturbation.
A combat of an extraordinary character was going on--a
combat which threatened to develop into a massacre.
Even to the operators who, unhappily for themselves,
were principals in this fight, it was a struggle in the dark.
They knew little about it, beyond the grimly-patent fact
that they were battling for their very lives.
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