"There! read--read the price-list to me. I am blind and helpless, for that jade has hid my glasses. I know she has. I cannot find them anywhere, and I _must_ know how Turkish bonds are going. Read to me. I'll hear what you have to say after." He thrust the paper into her hand, and sat down in the high-backed chair.
Poor Katherine felt almost dazed. She took a seat at the other side of the table, and began to look for the mysterious list. The geography of the mighty _Times_ was unknown to her, and even in her mother's humbler penny paper the City article was a portion she never glanced at. While she turned the wide pages, painfully bewildered, the old man "glowered" at her.
"I don't think you know what you are looking for," he cried, impatiently.
"I do not indeed! If you will show it to me----"
He snatched it from her, and pointed out the part he wished to hear. "Read from the beginning," he said.
Katherine obeyed, her courage returning as she found herself thus strangely installed within the fortress she feared to attack. She stumbled occasionally, and was sharply set upon her feet, in the matter of figures, by her eager hearer. At last she came to Turkish six per cents.
"Eighty-seven to eighty-eight and a quarter."
"Ha!" muttered the old man, "that's an advance! good! nothing to be done there yet. Now read the railway stocks."
Katherine obeyed. When she came to "Florida and Teche debentures, sixty-two and a half to sixty-five and three-fourths," she was startled by a sort of shrill shout. "Ay! _that's_ a rise! Some rigging design there! I must write--I must. Where, where has that----harridan hid my glasses? Why, it is almost twelve o'clock! the boy will be here for the paper immediately. And the post! the post! I must catch the post. Can you write?"
"You shall! you shall! here's paper"--rising and opening an ancient blotting-book, its covers all scribbled over with tiny figures, the result of much calculating, he hastily set forth writing materials, his lean, claw-like, dirty hands trembling with eagerness. "Hear, hear, write fast."
Katherine, growing a little clearer, and amazed at her own increasing self-possession, drew off her gloves, and taking the rusty pen offered her, wrote at his dictation: