oor unlocked. There was a little
fire among the ashes, and after blowing the sod for some time she
managed to light the candle, and holding it high she looked about the
kitchen.

"Auntie, are you asleep? Have the others gone to bed?"

She approached a few steps, and then a strange curiosity came over her,
and though she had always feared death she now looked curiously upon
death, and she thought that she saw the likeness which her aunt had
often noticed.

"Yes," she said, "she is like me. I shall be like that some day if I
live long enough."

And then she knocked at the door of the room where her parents were
sleeping.

CHAPTER IX

THE CLERK'S QUEST

For thirty years Edward Dempsey had worked low down in the list of
clerks in the firm of Quin and Wee. He did his work so well that he
seemed born to do it, and it was felt that any change in which Dempsey
was concerned would be unlucky. Managers had looked at Dempsey
doubtingly and had left him in his habits. New partners had come into
the business, but Dempsey showed no sign of interest. He was interested
only in his desk. There it was by the dim window, there were his pens,
there was his penwiper, there was the ruler, there was the
blotting-pad. Dempsey was always the first to arrive and the last to
leave. Once in thirty years of service he had accepted a holiday. It
had been a topic of conversation all the morning, and the clerks
tittered when he came into the bank in the afternoon saying he had been
looking into the shop windows all the morning, and had come down to the
bank to see how they were getting on.

An obscure, clandestine, taciturn little man, occupying in life only
the space necessary to bend over a desk, and whose conical head leaned
to one side as if in token of his humility.

It seemed that Dempsey had no other ambition than to be allowed to
stagnate at a desk to the end of his life, and this modest ambition
would have been realised had it not been for a slight accident--the
single accident that had found its way into Dempsey's well-ordered and
closely-guarded life. One summer's day, the heat of the areas arose and
filled the open window, and Dempsey's somnolescent senses were moved by
a soft and suave perfume. At first he was puzzled to say whence it
came; then he perceived that it had come from the bundle of cheques
which he held in his hand; and then that the odoriferous paper was a
pale pink cheque in the middle of the bundle. He