e patronage that he had received during a
decade.

"No!" he said. "Are you?"

Instead of kicking Denry out of the house for an impudent young
jackanapes, Mr Cotterill simply resumed his sheepish smile.

Denry had been surprised for a moment, but he had quickly recovered.
Cotterill's downfall was one of those events which any person of acute
intelligence can foretell after they have happened. Cotterill had run
the risks of the speculative builder, built and mortgaged, built and
mortgaged, sold at a profit, sold without profit, sold at a loss, and
failed to sell; given bills, second mortgages, and third mortgages; and
because he was a builder and could do nothing but build, he had
continued to build in defiance of Bursley's lack of enthusiasm for his
erections. If rich gold deposits had been discovered in Bursley
Municipal Park, Cotterill would have owned a mining camp and amassed
immense wealth; but unfortunately gold deposits were not discovered in
the Park. Nobody knew his position; nobody ever does know the position
of a speculative builder. He did not know it himself. There had been
rumours, but they had been contradicted in an adequate way. His recent
refusal of the mayoral chain, due to lack of spare coin, had been
attributed to prudence. His domestic existence had always been conducted
on the same moderately lavish scale. He had always paid the baker, the
butcher, the tailor, the dressmaker.

And now he was to file his petition in bankruptcy, and to-morrow the
entire town would have "been seeing it coming" for years.

"What shall you do?" Denry inquired in amicable curiosity.

"Well," said Cotterill, "that's the point. I've got a brother a builder
in Toronto, you know. He's doing very well; building _is_ building
over there. I wrote to him a bit since, and he replied by the next mail
--by the next mail--that what he wanted was just a man like me to
overlook things. He's getting an old man now, is John. So, you see,
there's an opening waiting for me."

As if to say, "The righteous are never forsaken."

"I tell you all this as you're a friend of the family like," he added.

Then, after an expanse of vagueness, he began hopefully, cheerfully,
undauntedly:

"Even _now_ if I could get hold of a couple of thousand I could
pull through handsome--and there's plenty of security for it."

"Bit late now, isn't it?"

"Not it. If only some one who really knows the town, and has faith in
the property market, woul