I am afraid, prepare
themselves for the arrival of a faithful cashier with news of
irretrievable ruin, or a mysterious and cynical stranger threatening
disclosures of a disgraceful nature.

But all such anticipations must at once be ruthlessly dispelled. Mr.
Bultitude, although he was certainly a merchant, was a fairly successful
one--in direct defiance of the laws of fiction, where any connection
with commerce seems to lead naturally to failure in one of the three
volumes.

He was an elderly gentleman, too, of irreproachable character and
antecedents; no Damocles' sword of exposure was swinging over his bald
but blameless head; he had no disasters to fear and no indiscretions to
conceal. He had not been intended for melodrama, with which, indeed, he
would not have considered it a respectable thing to be connected.

In fact, the secret of his uneasiness was so absurdly simple and
commonplace that I am rather ashamed to have made even a temporary
mystery of it.

His son Dick was about to return to school that evening, and Mr.
Bultitude was expecting every moment to be called upon to go through a
parting scene with him; that was really all that was troubling him.

This sounds very creditable to the tenderness of his feelings as a
father--for there are some parents who bear such a bereavement at the
close of the holidays with extraordinary fortitude, if they do not
actually betray an unnatural satisfaction at the event.

But it was not exactly from softness of heart that he was restless and
impatient, nor did he dread any severe strain upon his emotions. He was
not much given to sentiment, and was the author of more than one of
those pathetically indignant letters to the papers, in which the British
parent denounces the expenses of education and the unconscionable length
and frequency of vacations.

He was one of those nervous and fidgety persons who cannot understand
their own children, looking on them as objectionable monsters whose next
movements are uncertain--much as Frankenstein must have felt towards
_his_ monster.

He hated to have a boy about the house, and positively writhed under the
irrelevant and irrepressible questions, the unnecessary noises and
boisterous high spirits which nothing would subdue; his son's society
was to him simply an abominable nuisance, and he pined for a release
from it from the day the holidays began.

He had been a widower for nearly three years, and no doubt the loss of a
m