Mrs.Barclay was obliged to mortgage her house to obtain the means of living, and the very man who supplied her with the money was the very man whom her husband had blindly trusted.

She little dreamed that it was her own money he was doling out to her.
In fact, Squire Davenport himself had almost forgotten it.

He had come to consider the thousand dollars and interest fully and absolutely his own, and had no apprehension that his mean fraud would ever be discovered.

Like a thunderbolt, then, came to him the declaration of his unsavory visitor that the note was in existence, and was in the hands of a man who meant to use it.

Smitten with sudden panic, he stared in the face of the tramp.