up to call him to dinner. What excuse he made he could not
remember two minutes after she had gone down. But to make a fourth with
the motherly widow and her two bank clerks at the cheerful dinner-table
was a thing beyond him. Somewhat later he heard the two young men come
upstairs, and, still further along, go down again. They were social
souls, his two fellow lodgers; kindly young fellows with boyish faces
and honest eyes: Griswold wondered if they would still look up to him
and defer to him as the older man of broader culture if they could
know....

The tiny chiming clock on his dressing-case in the adjoining bedroom had
tinkled forth its ten tapping hammer strokes when the man sitting in the
dark heard the pounding of hoofs and the rattling of buggy wheels in the
quiet street. He was absently awaking to the fact that the vehicle had
stopped at his own door when he heard voices, the widow's and another,
in the lower hall, and then a man's footsteps on the stair. To a
hard-pressed breaker of the traditions at such a moment an unannounced
visitor, coming up in the dark, could mean but one thing. Griswold
silently opened a drawer in the writing-table and groped for the mate to
the quick-firing pistol which, after the change of wet clothing, he had
put aside to dry.

The visitor came heavily upstairs, and Griswold, swinging his chair to
face the open door, saw the shadowy bulking of the man as he came
through the upper hall. When the bulk filled the doorway it was covered
by the pistol held low, and Griswold's finger was pressing the trigger.

"Asleep, old man?" said the intruder in Raymer's well-known voice.

There was a sound like a gasping sob, and another as of a drawer closing
softly. Then Griswold said: "No; I'm not asleep. Come in. Shall I light
the gas?"

"Not for me," returned the bedtime visitor, entering and groping for the
chair at the desk-end, into which, when he had placed it, he dropped
wearily. "I want to smoke," he went on. "Have you got a cigar--no, not
the pipe; I want something that I can chew on."

A cigar was found, in the drawer which had so lately furnished the
weapon, and by the flare of the match in Raymer's fingers Griswold saw a
face haggard with anxiety. In the kindlier days it had been one of his
redeeming characteristics that he could never dwell long upon his own
harassments when another's troubles were brought to him.

"What is the matter, Edward?" he asked.

"A mix-up with the