to come up to the big house on the hill the night before this other night of old John Runnels's call. I went, taking it as a matter of course that she wished to talk to me about the trouble at the bank, and saying to myself that I was going to be iron and steel and adamant; this when I might have known that I should be only putty in her hands. She met me on the porch, and made me sit with my back to the window, which was open, while she faced me, sitting in the hammock where the house lights fell fairly upon her and I could get the full benefit of the honeying eyes and baby lips as she talked. She had begun by saying in catchy little murmurings that I knew better than any one else what it was going to mean to her--to all of them--if her father's crookedness (she called it his "mistake") in using the depositors' money for his own speculations should be published abroad; and I did. She was engaged to young Wheelan-

d, son of the copper magnate Wheeland, of New York, and the wedding date was set. Black ruin was staring them all in the face, she said, and I could save them, if I only would. What would be shouted from the housetops as a penitentiary offense in the president of the bank would be condoned as a mere error in judgment on the part of a hired bookkeeper. If I would only consent to let the directors think that I was the one who had passed upon and accepted the mining-stock collateral--which had taken the place in the bank's vault of the good, hard money of the depositors--well, I could see how easily the dreadful crisis would be tided over; and besides earning the undying gratitude of the family, her father would stand by me and I would lose nothing in the end. For one little minute she almost made me believe what she didn't believe herself--that the crime wasn't a crime. Her father, "our eminent and public-spirited-

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