profit of 821 pounds. He was not
surprised, and yet the sight of the figures in his father's heavy,
scratchy hand was curiously impressive.

His father could keep nothing from him now. The interior of the safe
was like a city that had capitulated; no law ran in it but his law, and
he was absolute; he could commit infamies in the city and none might
criticise. He turned over piles of dusty cheque-counterfoils, and old
pass-books and other old books of account. He saw a linen bag crammed
with four-shilling pieces (whenever Darius obtained a double florin he
put it aside), and one or two old watches of no value. Also the
title-deeds of the house at Bleakridge, their latest parchment still
white with pounce; the mortgage, then, had been repaid, a fact which
Darius had managed on principle to conceal from his son. Then he came
to the four drawers, and in some of these he discovered a number of
miscellaneous share-certificates with their big seals. He knew that his
father had investments--it was impossible to inhabit the shop-cubicle
with his father and not know that--but he had no conception of their
extent or their value. Always he had regarded all those matters as
foreign to himself, refusing to allow curiosity in regard to them to
awake. Now he was differently minded, owing to the mere physical weight
in his pocket of a bunch of keys! In a hasty examination he gathered
that the stock was chiefly in railways and shipping, and that it
amounted to large sums--anyhow quite a number of thousands. He was
frankly astonished. How had his father's clumsy, slow intellect been
able to cope with the dangerous intricacies of the Stock Exchange? It
seemed incredible; and yet he had known quite well that his father was
an investor!

"Of course he isn't keen on giving it all up!" Edwin exclaimed aloud
suddenly. "I wonder he even forked out the keys as easily as he did!"

The view of the safe enabled him to perform a feat which very few
children ever achieve; he put himself in his father's place. And it was
with benevolence, not with exasperation, that he puzzled his head to
invent some device for defeating the old man's obstinacy about
cheque-signing.

One drawer was evidently not in regular use. Often, in a series of
drawers, one of them falls into the idle habit of being overlooked,
slipping gradually by custom into desuetude, though other drawers may
overflow. This drawer held merely a few scraps of sample paper