thful office-boy! His father would turn in his grave. It would be
almost as bad as being discharged for dishonesty.

Don's lips came together in thin lines. This would never do--never in
the world. As Miss Winthrop suggested, he had much better resign.
Perhaps he ought to resign, anyway. No matter what he might do in the
future, he could not redeem the past; and if Farnsworth felt he had
not been playing the game right, he ought to take the matter in his
own hands and get off the team. But, in a way, that would be
quitting--and the Pendletons had never been quitters. It would be
quitting, both inside the office and out. He had to have that salary
to live on. Without it, life would become a very serious matter. The
more he thought of this, the more he realized that resigning was out
of the question. He really had no alternative but to make good; so he
_would_ make good.

The resolution, in itself, was enough to brace him. The important
thing now was, not to make Carter, Rand & Seagraves understand this,
not to make Farnsworth understand this: it was to make Miss Winthrop
understand it. He seized a pen and began to write.

MY DEAR SARAH K. WINTHROP [he began]:--

Farnsworth ought to be sitting at your desk plugging that machine,
and you ought to be holding down his chair before the roll-top
desk. You'd get more work out of every man in the office in a week
than he does in a month. Maybe he knows more about bonds than you
do, but he doesn't know as much about men. If he did he'd have
waded into me just the way you did.

I'm not saying Farnsworth hasn't good cause to fire me. He has,
and that's just what you've made clear. But, honest and hope to
die, I didn't realize it until I read your letter. I knew I'd been
getting in late and all that; but, as long as it didn't seem to
make any difference to any one, I couldn't see the harm in it. I'd
probably have kept on doing it if you hadn't warned me. And I'd
have been fired, and deserved it.

If that had happened I think my father would have risen from his
grave long enough to come back and disown me. He was the sort of
man I have a notion you'd have liked. He'd be down to the office
before the doors were open, and he'd stay until some one put him
out. I guess he was born that way. But I don't believe he ever
stayed up after ten o'clock at night in his life. Maybe there
wasn't as much doing in New York after ten in those days as t