He did not know that his prosperity had touched then its high-water mark, and that the tide was already on the turn.
Two days afterwards he knew.

Mr.Vinck, hearing the rattle of the door-handle, jumped up from his desk--where he had been tremulously listening to the loud voices in the private office--and buried his face in the big safe with nervous haste.

For the last time Willems passed through the little green door leading to Hudig's sanctum, which, during the past half-hour, might have been taken--from the fiendish noise within--for the cavern of some wild beast.

Willems' troubled eyes took in the quick impression of men and things as he came out from the place of his humiliation.

He saw the scared expression of the punkah boy; the Chinamen tellers sitting on their heels with unmovable faces turned up blankly towards him while their arrested hands hovered over the little piles of bright guilders ranged on the floor; Mr.Vinck's shoulder-blades with the fleshy rims of two red ears above.