desk. I'm sorry to be leaving
home--at such a time--when you've--"

"You'll telegraph when to meet you?" Elbridge suggested.

"Yes," said Northwick. He went inside the station, which was deliciously
warm from the large register in the centre of the room, and brilliantly
lighted in readiness for the train now almost due. The closing of the
door behind Northwick roused a little black figure drooping forward on
the benching in one corner. It was the drunken lawyer. There had been
some displeasures, general and personal, between the two men, and they
did not speak; but now, at sight of Northwick, Putney came forward, and
fixed him severely with his eye.

"Northwick! Do you know who you tried to drive over, last evening?"

Northwick returned his regard with the half-ironical, half-patronizing
look a dull man puts on with a person of less fortune but more brain. "I
didn't see you, Mr. Putney, until I was quite upon you. The horses--"

"It was the LAW you tried to drive over!" thundered the little man with
a voice out of keeping with his slender body. "Don't try it too often!
You can't drive over the Law, _yet_--you haven't quite millions enough
for that. Heigh? That so?" he queried, sensible of the anti-climax of
asking such a question in that way, but tipsily helpless in it.

Northwick did not answer; he walked to the other end of the station set
off for ladies, and Putney did not follow him. The train came in, and
Northwick went out and got aboard.

VII.

The president of the Board, who had called Northwick a thief, and yet
had got him a chance to make himself an honest man, was awake at the
hour the defaulter absconded, after passing quite as sleepless a night.
He had kept a dinner engagement, hoping to forget Northwick, but he
seemed to be eating and drinking him at every course. When he came home
toward eleven o'clock, he went to his library and sat down before the
fire. His wife had gone to bed, and his son and daughter were at a ball;
and he sat there alone, smoking impatiently.

He told the man who looked in to see if he wanted anything that he might
go to bed; he need not sit up for the young people. Hilary had that kind
of consideration for servants, and he liked to practise it; he liked to
realize that he was practising it now, in a moment when every habit of
his life might very well yield to the great and varying anxieties which
beset him.

He had an ideal of conduct, of what was due from him to