press upon your mind," I said, "that neither
she nor Mr. Forbes would have been guilty of this misdemeanour if they
had not been very much in love with one another, and very much in want of
money."

"Ah!" replied the secretary, with a smile, "if Cleopatra's nose had been
shorter, the fate of the world would have been different!"

NO. 5 BRANCH LINE
THE ENGINEER

His name, sir, was Matthew Price; mine is Benjamin Hardy. We were born
within a few days of each other; bred up in the same village; taught at
the same school. I cannot remember the time when we were not close
friends. Even as boys, we never knew what it was to quarrel. We had not
a thought, we had not a possession, that was not in common. We would
have stood by each other, fearlessly, to the death. It was such a
friendship as one reads about sometimes in books: fast and firm as the
great Tors upon our native moorlands, true as the sun in the heavens.

The name of our village was Chadleigh. Lifted high above the pasture
flats which stretched away at our feet like a measureless green lake and
melted into mist on the furthest horizon, it nestled, a tiny stone-built
hamlet, in a sheltered hollow about midway between the plain and the
plateau. Above us, rising ridge beyond ridge, slope beyond slope, spread
the mountainous moor-country, bare and bleak for the most part, with here
and there a patch of cultivated field or hardy plantation, and crowned
highest of all with masses of huge grey crag, abrupt, isolated, hoary,
and older than the deluge. These were the Tors--Druids' Tor, King's Tor,
Castle Tor, and the like; sacred places, as I have heard, in the ancient
time, where crownings, burnings, human sacrifices, and all kinds of
bloody heathen rites were performed. Bones, too, had been found there,
and arrow-heads, and ornaments of gold and glass. I had a vague awe of
the Tors in those boyish days, and would not have gone near them after
dark for the heaviest bribe.

I have said that we were born in the same village. He was the son of a
small farmer, named William Price, and the eldest of a family of seven; I
was the only child of Ephraim Hardy, the Chadleigh blacksmith--a
well-known man in those parts, whose memory is not forgotten to this day.
Just so far as a farmer is supposed to be a bigger man than a blacksmith,
Mat's father might be said to have a better standing than mine; but
William Price, with his small holding and his seven boys, w