ut knowing
what I was about. In three minutes from the time when the stranger had
closed my door the clerk had started for the bank, and I was alone again
in my room, with my hands as cold as ice and my head all in a whirl.

I did not recover my control over myself until the clerk came back with
the notes in his hand. He had just got to the bank in the nick of time.
As the cash for my draft was handed to him over the counter, the clock
struck five, and he heard the order given to close the doors.

When I had counted the bank-notes and had locked them up in the safe,
my better sense seemed to come back to me on a sudden. Never have I
reproached myself before or since as I reproached myself at that moment.
What sort of return had I made for Mr. Fauntleroy's fatherly kindness
to me? I had insulted him by the meanest, the grossest distrust of the
honor and the credit of his house, and that on the word of an
absolute stranger, of a vagabond, if ever there was one yet. It was
madness--downright madness in any man to have acted as I had done. I
could not account for my own inconceivably thoughtless proceeding. I
could hardly believe in it myself. I opened the safe and looked at the
bank-notes again. I locked it once more, and flung the key down on
the table in a fury of vexation against myself. There the money was,
upbraiding me with my own inconceivable folly, telling me in the
plainest terms that I had risked depriving myself of my best and kindest
friend henceforth and forever.

It was necessary to do something at once toward making all the atonement
that lay in my power. I felt that, as soon as I began to cool down a
little. There was but one plain, straight-forward way left now out of
the scrape in which I had been mad enough to involve myself. I took my
hat, and, without stopping an instant to hesitate, hurried off to the
bank to make a clean breast of it to Mr. Fauntleroy.

When I knocked at the private door and asked for him, I was told that
he had not been at the bank for the last two days. One of the other
partners was there, however, and was working at that moment in his own
room.

I sent in my name at once, and asked to see him. He and I were little
better than strangers to each other, and the interview was likely to be,
on that account, unspeakably embarrassing and humiliating on my side.
Still, I could not go home. I could not endure the inaction of the next
day, the Sunday, without having done my best on th