nearly dead, but he gathered sufficient strength to shove a locked steel box towards his daughter and tell her to keep it from Munn, and keep it locked until she found an honest man in the world. The next morning O'Hara appeared to be much better. His friend Munn came to see him; also came Peyster Sprowl in some alarm, on the matter of the proceedings threatened. But O'Hara turned his back on them both and calmly closed his eyes and ears to their presence.
Munn went out of the room, but laid his large, thin ear against the door. Sprowl worried O'Hara for an hour, but, getting no reply from the man in the bed, withdrew at last with considerable violence. O'Hara, however, had fooled them both: he had been dead all the while. The day after the funeral, Sprowl came back to look for O'Hara's daughter; and as he peeped into the door of the squalid flat he saw a thin, yellow-eyed young man, with a bony face, all furry in promise of future whiskers, rummaging through O'Hara's effects. This young gentleman was Munn. In a dark corner of the disordered room sat the child, Eileen, a white, shadowy elf of six, reading in the Book of Common Prayer. Sprowl entered the room; Munn looked up, then coolly continued to rummage.
Sprowl first addressed himself to the child, in a heavy, patronizing voice: "It's too dark to read there in that corner, young one. Take your book out into the hall."
"I can see better to read in the dark," said the child, lifting her great, dark-blue eyes.
"Go out into the hall," said Sprowl, sharply.
The child shrank back, and went, taking her little jacket in one hand, her battered travelling-satchel in the other. If the two men could have known that the steel box was in that satchel this story might never have been told. But it never entered their heads that the pallid little waif had sense enough to conceal a button to her own profit. "Munn," said Sprowl, lighting a cigar, "what is there in this business?"
"I'll tell you when I'm done," observed Munn, coolly. Sprowl sat down on the bed where O'Hara had died, cocked the cigar up in his mouth, and blew smoke, musingly, at the ceiling. Munn found nothing--not a scrap of paper, not a line. This staggered him, but he did not intend that Sprowl should know it.
"Found what you want?" asked Sprowl, comfortably.
"Yes," replied Munn.
"Belong to the kid?"
"Yes; I'm her guardian." The men measured each other in silence for a minute. "What will you take to keep quiet?" asked Sprowl. "I'll give you a thousand dollars."
"I want five thousand," said Munn, firmly.
"I'll double it for the papers," said Sprowl. Munn waited. "There's not a paper left," he said; "O'Hara made me burn 'em."
"Twenty thousand for the papers," said Sprowl, calmly.
"My God, Mr. Sprowl!" growled Munn, white and sweating with anguish. "I'd 

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