While something certainly was due him--and she of all women in the world should supply it--forcing her to carry out the landlord's plan, now that he thought it over, might result in a certain kind of publicity, which, if his own antecedents were looked into, would be particularly embarrassing.

She might--and here a slight shiver passed through him--she might, in her obstinacy, threaten him with the forged certificates, a result hardly possible, for no letters of any kind had reached her, none so far as he knew; neither had he ever discussed the incident with her, for the simple reason that women, as a rule, never understood such things.

And yet how could he, as a financier, have tided over an accounting which, if allowed to go on, would have wiped out the savings of hundreds who had trusted him and whom he could not desert in their hour of need, except by some such desperate means?
Of course, if he had to do it all over again, he would never have locked up the stock-book in his own safe.

That was a mistake.

He ought to have left it with the treasurer.