down upon his dead mother's face, no woman's hand had sought
his with tenderness. All his long life of grasping greed had been spent
in money-getting and money-saving. No sense of right or justice had ever
restrained him; but only the fear of getting caught had kept him from
downright stealing. Year after year he had added to his hoard, carefully
invested it, and now in a few days of desperate dread it had all been
swept away!

Then perhaps the memory of that mother, as he had seen her last, with
pallid face and folded arms, brought to him the first and only good
impulse he ever felt, for he took a pen and wrote a brief but valuable
letter. Then he went to his tall safe, opened both doors, and taking a
small, flat packet from an inner till, returned to his desk, placed that
and the letter in one long envelope, and sealed and directed it.

And now all the misery and despair of his situation returned with
intense force, and as it crushed him down, obliterating every vestige of
hope, once more his head sank forward on the desk and he groaned aloud.
For a long time he remained thus, living over the past three weeks of
agony, and then there smote upon his tortured nerves the sound of many
clocks striking one. It sounded as if they were mocking him, and from
far and near--some harsh and sharp, some faint in the distance--came
that fatal one, one, one! He arose and, going to a small locker in his
room, grasped a half-filled bottle of liquor and drank deeply. It only
made matters worse, for now an uncanny delirium crept into his
rum-charged brain and he fancied himself looking into an open grave and
there, at the bottom, lay a wasted woman's body, the face shrunken and
pallid and teeth showing in mocking grin. Then he seemed to be lying
there himself, looking up, and peering down at him were the faces of
many men, some bearing the impress of hate, and some of derisive
laughter.

And one was Albert Page, with a look of scorn.

He arose again, and taking a letter-opener, crowded bits of paper into
the keyhole of the door and up and down the crack. Then he closed the
one window, turned out the two gas-jets, and opened the stop-cocks
again. An odor of gas soon pervaded the room into which came only a
faint light from the State House dome. And now a more hideous
hallucination came to that hopeless, despairing man, for between the
open doors of his tall safe stood the wasted form of his mother! Her
gray hair was combed flat on ei