ear

of awful impressions. The fall into the street, and the rope the horrible bruise of it under his But the cut on his face, the scratch on his neck, the bruises on his arms, and the loss of his coat and shirt, and the great tear up his trousers leg, all came to him when his mind was too distraught to record impressions in memory. So when the policemen brought him into the bank, a bleeding, half-naked, sobbing old man — - he who had walked Constitution Street so proudly for fifty years he fell in a shamed heap, half conscious and afraid, in his great chair, and shook in hysteria and terror.

these things he remembered.

The front windows of the bank were broken. The men outside had rescued the veneer of gold from the pile in the windows, but the mob kept surging in, and only pistol shots from the examiners stopped the intruders. Dust from falling plaster was in the air and the roar of the balked crowd came like the bark of some rabid beast, into the ears of the group that stood around the figure that was Boyce Kilworth, huddled in his heavy throne-like chair.

Then in due course they took him home. A squad of mounted policemen appeared at the side

door of the bank, and the mob hooted. When Kilworth, supported by the policemen, limped to his car, he heard the crowd cat-calling and hissing. The horsemen about his car tried to screen him from the jeering throng; and when he was gone the baffled rioters stayed behind in the street and howled their rage out.

So Boyce Kilworth rode out of Constitution Street. An hour after he was gone, the examiner in charge pasted this notice on the yellow pine boards that marked the place where the window had been:

"This bank is closed, by order of
the comptroller of the currency.
"S. HORTON,

"Temporary Receiver."

The evening papers carried the story of the mob, and were kind to Boyce Kilworth; they even played up in big type his statement that the bank was sound; that it would pay its depositors in full. The word "arrest was the only unfriendly word in the evening papers, and Kilworth's friends resented it loudly on the streets, and in the newspaper office that evening.

When Dick Hale went home that night he found his mother in the midst of one of her clamorous cataclysmic tantrums; the bank failure seemed to have started her, but her grievances were running back to events thirty years before, and the son ate his evening meal in shame and silence. At eight o'clock Colonel Longford came hobbling in plump into the midst of a particularly rampant tirade from Mrs. Hale. She stood glaring at the Colonel a fierce moment, then vanished, and Caleb Hale looked up unruffled and began to hum:

"Sister, thou art mild and lovely

"Gentle as the summer breeze,"

At the end of the stanza he paused to sigh. "Well, Colonel? So that's the end of Boyce Kilworth!"

"Poor, poor Boyce," replied the Colonel, "I spent the afternoon with him, and it seemed to help him to talk to talk it all over from the beginning; from the time when he helped to stuff the ballot box, and farmed out the county money." The Colonel got out two black cigars, and the old men lighted them.

back in a chair, peering through uplifted bony knees at the universe, "Boyce hasn't got it yet. Lord Lord, why couldn't he break the tether

the thing that bound him, limited him, baffled him, and now is killing him. Just a little beyond him, just outside the circle that he trod and maybe strained to break from, lay greatness and happiness. If he could only-only have had a heart!"

"Taking it rather hard-I guess?" asked Caleb Hale. Dick went to his room and did not hear the Colonel's further lesson and collect upon the day's events. The Colonel smoked a while and answered:

"Yes-damn-hard! That other Pharisee, condemned to simmer forever in his own juice on the trashpile outside Jerusalem, is having a tolerably comfortable time, compared with Boyce, Cale!"

"Kind of wants his money back — I take it?” suggested Hale.

"Yes, that too," returned the Colonel. "Wants his money, and his power, and his Providential relation to the town all back. But his girls are left penniless, and he thinks they're ruined."

The Colonel mused, And I guess they are just about ruined without money- the kind he's raised - all but Debbie. And he's worried about Mrs. Kilworth the dear old canary, what'll she do for pepper-grass and cuttlebone, outside the golden cage. You see, money just sheer, raw money has been his dependence, and his family's dependence, and when it's gone - - it's the God's truth what is there to him or them without it?"

"Hell? ain't it?" came back Caleb Hale in

the silence.

"And six to carry, Cale!" assented the Colonel. "But that isn't the worst of it as I started to tell you. He sits there slumped all over mentally and morally without faith in man or God, or himself bewailing the fact that he has ruined the lives of thousands of people. I says:

666

Boyce, you can't ruin people by taking money from them not even all their money.' He stared at me as though I was mad, and moaned Then I says:

on.

666

Boyce,' sez I, 'Boyce, can't you get it through your head that other people aren't made or unmade by money? Suppose you've taken all they've got - some of 'em - lots of 'em, maybe.