Under one arm he carried a large book carefully wrapped in brown paper. He carried it as if he feared and disliked it, and yet it and its fellows had been the vessels of his temple and his own dedication for years.

Grant barely came to Deep Dale. Richard Bransby dealt with his subordinates not meanly. A turkey at Christmas, a suitable sum of money on boxing-day, leniency at illness, and a coffin when requisite, were always forthcoming—but an invitation to dinner was unheard and unthought of, and even Grant, in spite of the responsibility and implicit trustedness of his position, and of the intimacy of their boyhood, scarcely once had tasted a brew of his master’s tea.

A nervous little maid, palpably a war-substitute either for the spruce man-servant or the sprucer parlor-maid, one of whom had always admitted him heretofore, answered his ring, and showed him awkwardly into the library. She collided with him as they went in, and collided with the door itself as she went out to announce his presence.

“Tell Mr. Bransby I should be most grateful if he would see me when he is disengaged, and—er—you might add that the matter is—er—urgent—er—that is, as soon as they have quite finished dinner. Just don’t mention my being here until he has left the dining-room—er—in fact, not until he is disengaged—er—alone.”

Left by himself Grant placed his top hat on a table and laid his parcel beside it. He unfastened the string, and partly unwrapped the ledger. Walking to the fireplace, he rolled up the string very neatly and put it carefully in his waistcoat pocket; ready to his hand should he carry the ledger back to London with him; ready to some other service for “Bransby and Co.”—if the ledger remained with his chief.

The clerk glanced about the room—and possibly saw it—but he never turned his back on the big buff book, or his eyes from it long.

It was a fine old-fashioned room, paneled in dark oak. Not in the least gloomy, yet even when, as now, brilliantly lit, fire on the hearth, the electric lamps and wall-lights turned up, it seemed invested with shadows, shadows lending it an impalpable suggestion of mystery. The room was not greatly changed since the spring evening thirteen years ago when Helen had sat on her father’s knee here and grown sleepy at his reading of Dickens. The curtains were new, and two of the pictures. The valuable carpet was the same and most of the furniture. The flowers might have been the same—Helen’s favorite heliotrope and carnations. The dolls were gone. But the banjo on the chesterfield and the box of 

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