would. What would be shouted from the housetops as a
penitentiary offense in the president of the bank would be condoned as
a mere error in judgment on the part of a hired bookkeeper.

If I would only consent to let the directors think that I was the one
who had passed upon and accepted the mining-stock collateral--which had
taken the place in the bank's vault of the good, hard money of the
depositors--well, I could see how easily the dreadful crisis would be
tided over; and besides earning the undying gratitude of the family,
her father would stand by me and I would lose nothing in the end.

For one little minute she almost made me believe what she didn't
believe herself--that the crime wasn't a crime. Her father, "our
eminent and public-spirited fellow-citizen, the Hon. Abel Geddis," to
quote the editor of the Glendale _Daily Courier_, was desperately
involved. For months he had been throwing good money after bad in a
Western gold mine; not only his own money, but the bank's as well. At
the long last the half-dozen sleepy directors, three of them retired
farmers and the other three local merchants, had awakened to the fact
that there was something wrong. They didn't know fully, as yet, just
what they were in for; Geddis's part of the bookkeeping was in a
horrible muddle owing to his efforts to hide the defalcation. But they
knew enough to be certain that somebody had been skating upon thin ice
and had broken through.

"You can't help seeing just how it is, Herbert," Agatha had pleaded,
with the soulful look in her pretty eyes and the baby lips all in a
tremble. "If the faintest breath of this gets out, VanBruce Wheeland
will have to know, and then everything will come to an end and I shall
want to go and drown myself in the river. You are young and strong and
brave, and you can live down a--an error of judgment"--she kept on
calling it that, as if the words had been put into her mouth; as they
probably had. "Promise me, Herbert, won't you?--for--for the sake of
the old times when you used to carry my books to school, and I--I----"

What was the use? Every man is privileged to be a fool once in a
while, and a young man sometimes twice in a while. I promised her that
I would shoulder the load, or at least find some way out for her
father; and when she asked me how it could be done, I was besotted
enough to explain how the mining-stock business had really passed
through my hands--as it had in a purely routi