The world passed on, leaving him lying there, nerveless, exhausted, a derelict on a sea too stormy for such as he--a wreck that might have sailed safely in narrower waters.
And some day he'd be patched up and set afloat once more to cruise and operate and have his being in the safer and smaller seas; some day, when the nerve crash had subsided and the slow, wounded mind came back to itself, and its petty functions were once more resumed--its envious scheming, its covetous capability, its vicious achievement.

For with him achievement could embody only the meaner imitations of the sheer colossal _coups_ by which the great financiers gutted a nation with kid-gloved fingers, and changed their gloves after the operation so that no blood might stick to Peter's pence or smear the corner-stones of those vast and shadowy institutions upreared in restitution--black silhouettes against the infernal sunset of lives that end in the shadowy death of souls.
* * * * * Even before Neergard's illness Ruthven's domestic and financial affairs were in a villainous mess.

Rid of Neergard, he had meant to deal him a crashing blow at the breakaway which would settle him for ever and incidentally bring to a crisis his own status in regard to his wife.
Whether or not his wife was mentally competent he did not know; he did not know anything about her.

But he meant to.

Selwyn's threat, still fairly fresh in his memory, had given him no definite idea of Alixe, her whereabouts, her future plans, and whether or not her mental condition was supposed to be permanently impaired or otherwise.
That she had been, and probably now was, under Selwyn's protection he believed; what she and Selwyn intended to do he did not know.