Day after day the papers were full of the facts, and it was weeks before
the editorial homilies ceased. From time to time, fresh details and
unexpected revelations, wise guesses and shameless fakes, renewed the
interest of the original fact. There were days when there was nothing
about it in the papers, and then days when it broke out in vivid
paragraphs and whole lurid columns again. It was not that the fraud was
singular in its features; these were common to most of the defalcations,
great and small, which were of daily fame in the newspapers. But the
doubt as to the man's fate, and the enduring mystery of his whereabouts,
if he were still alive, were qualities that gave peculiar poignancy to
Northwick's case. Its results in the failure of people not directly
involved, were greater than could have been expected; and the sum of his
peculations mounted under investigation. It was all much worse than had
been imagined, and in most of the editorial sermons upon it the moral
gravity of the offence was measured by the amounts stolen and indirectly
lost by it. There was a great deal of mere astonishment, as usual, that
the crime should have been that of a man whom no one would have dreamed
of suspecting, and there was some sufficiently ridiculous consternation
at the presence of such moral decay in the very heart of the commercial
life of Boston.

In the _Events_, Pinney made his report of the affair the work of art
which he boasted should come from his hand. It was really a space-man's
masterpiece; and it appealed to every nerve in the reader's body, with
its sensations repeated through many columns, and continued from page to
page with a recurrent efflorescence of scare-heads and catch-lines. In
the ardor of production, all scruples and reluctances became fused in a
devotion to the interests of the _Events_ and its readers. With every
hour the painful impressions of his interview with Miss Northwick grew
fainter, and the desire to use it stronger, and he ended by sparing no
color of it. But he compromised with his sympathy for her, by deepening
the shadows in the behavior of the man who could bring all this sorrow
upon those dearest to him. He dwelt upon the unconsciousness of the
family, the ignorance of the whole household, in which life ran smoothly
on, while the head of both was a fugitive from justice, if not the
victim of a swift retribution. He worked in all the pathos which the
facts were capable of holding, and at