eared at the
door of the cubicle with the slip.

"It's not quite time yet, sir."

"Go to yer dinner, I tell ye."

Stifford had three-quarters of an hour for his dinner.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TWO.

Darius combined the slip with the book and made a total.

"Petty cash," he muttered shortly.

Edwin produced the petty cash-book, a volume of very trifling
importance.

"Now bring me the till."

Edwin went out of the cubicle and brought the till, which was a large
and battered japanned cash-box with a lid in two independent parts, from
its well-concealed drawer behind the fancy-counter. Darius counted the
coins in it and made calculations on blotting-paper, breathing
stertorously all the time.

"What on earth are you trying to get at?" Edwin asked, with innocent
familiarity. He thought that the Club-share crisis had been postponed
by one of his father's swift strange caprices.

Darius turned on him glaring: "I'm trying to get at where ye got the
brass from to buy them there books as I saw last night. Where did ye
get it from? There's nowt wrong here, unless ye're a mighty lot
cleverer than I take ye for. Where did ye get it from? Ye don't mean
to tell me as ye saved it up!"

Edwin had had some shocks in his life. This was the greatest. He could
feel his cheeks and his hands growing dully hot, and his eyes smarting;
and he was suddenly animated by an almost murderous hatred and an
inexpressible disgust for his father, who in the grossness of his
perceptions and his notions had imagined his son to be a thief.
"Loathsome beast!" he thought savagely.

"I'm waiting," said his father.

"I've drawn my Club money," said Edwin.

For an instant the old man was at a loss; then he understood. He had
entirely forgotten the maturing of the Club share, and assuredly he had
not dreamed that Edwin would accept and secrete so vast a sum as fifty
pounds without uttering a word. Darius had made a mistake, and a bad
one; but in those days fathers were never wrong; above all they never
apologised. In Edwin's wicked act of concealment Darius could choose
new and effective ground, and he did so.

"And what dost mean by doing that and saying nowt? Sneaking--"

"What do you mean by calling me a thief?" Edwin and Darius were equally
startled by this speech. Edwin knew not what had come over him, and
Darius, never having been addressed in such a dangerous tone by