Then he dropped his hands from his face and drew a long breath, the kind of breath a man draws who has been battling with the waves and finds himself on the shore, exhausted but still alive.
Stafford laid a hand on his shoulder, and Sir Stephen started and looked up at him as if he had forgotten his presence.

A flush, as if of shame, came upon the great financier's face, and he frowned at the papers lying before him, where they had dropped from his hand.
"What an escape, Stafford!" he said, his voice still rather thick and with a tremour of excitement and even exhaustion in its usually clear and steady tone.

"I am ashamed, my boy, that you should have been a witness to my defeat: it humiliates, mortifies me!" "Don't let that worry you, father," said Stafford, scarcely knowing what he said, for the tumult in his brain, the dread at his heart.
"It is not the first defeat I have suffered in my life; like other successful men, I have known what it is to fall; and I have laughed and got up and shaken the dust off myself, so to speak, and gone at the fight again, all the harder and more determined because of the reverse.
But this--this would have crushed me utterly and forever." "Do you mean that it would have ruined you completely, father ?" said Stafford.
"Completely!" replied Sir Stephen in a low voice, his head drooping.

"I had staked everything on this venture, had staked even more than I possessed.

I cannot explain all the details, the ramifications, of the scheme which I have been working.