"I had it in my pocket," he resumed, with an accession
of mellow emotion in his voice, "and none of the callers
ever got my thoughts very far from that letter.
And one of these was an old man--a French banker who must
be seventy years old, but dyes his hair a kind of purple
black--and it seems that his nephew had got the firm into
a terrible kind of scrape, selling 2,000 of my shares
when he hadn't got them to sell and couldn't get them--and
the old man came to beg me to let him out at present
market figures. He got Lord Chaldon--he's my Chairman,
you know--to bring him, and introduce him as his friend,
and plead for him--but I don't think all that, by itself,
would have budged me an atom. But then the old man told
how he was just able to scrape together money enough
to buy the shares he needed, at the ruling price, and he
happened to mention that his niece's marriage portion
would have to be sacrificed. Well, then, do you know,
that letter in my pocket said something to me....And--well,
that's the story. The girl' s portion, I wormed it
out of him, was ten thousand...and I struck that much
off the figure that I allowed him to buy his shares,
and save his firm, for....It was all the letter that did it,
mind you!"
He concluded the halting narrative amid a marked silence.
The ladies looked at him and at each other, but they
seemed surprised out of their facility of comment.
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