Please hurry and close with him before he leaves town.”

Again the door opened at the secretary’s touch. “Mr. Madden, of New York,” said the girl.

“Yes,” said Eden. “We’ll see him at once.” He turned to his old friend. “I asked him to come here this morning and meet you. Now take my advice and don’t be too eager. We may be able to boost him a bit, though I doubt it. He’s a hard man, Sally, a hard man. The newspaper stories about him are only too true.”

He broke off suddenly, for the hard man he spoke of stood upon his rug. P.J. himself, the great Madden, the hero of a thousand Wall Street battles, six feet and over and looming like a tower of granite in the gray clothes he always affected. His cold blue eyes swept the room like an Arctic blast.

“Ah, Mr. Madden, come in,” said Eden, rising. Madden advanced farther into the room, and after him came a tall languid girl in expensive furs and a lean, precise-looking man in a dark blue suit.

“Madame Jordan, this is Mr. Madden, of whom we have just been speaking,” Eden said.

“Madame Jordan,” repeated Madden, bowing slightly. He had dealt so much in steel it had got somehow into his voice. “I’ve brought along my daughter Evelyn, and my secretary, Martin Thorn.”

“Charmed, I’m sure,” Eden answered. He stood for a moment gazing at this interesting group that had invaded his quiet office — the famous financier, cool, competent, conscious of his power, the slender haughty girl upon whom, it was reported, Madden lavished all the affection of his later years, the thin intense secretary, subserviently in the background but for some reason not so negligible as he might have been. “Won’t you all sit down, please,” the jeweler continued. He arranged chairs. Madden drew his close to the desk; the air seemed charged with his presence; he dwarfed them all.

“No need of any preamble,” said the millionaire. “We’ve come to see those pearls.”

Eden started. “My dear sir — I’m afraid I gave you the wrong impression. The pearls are not in San Francisco at present.”

Madden stared at him. “But when you told me to come here and meet the owner —”

“I’m so sorry — I meant just that.”

Sally Jordan helped him out. “You see, Mr. Madden, I had no intention of selling the necklace when I came here from Honolulu. I was moved to that decision by events after I reached here. But I have sent for it —”

The girl spoke. She had thrown back the fur about her neck, and she was beautiful in her way, but cold and hard like her father — and just now, evidently, unutterably bored.