beyond the time! What a fool I was to think I
could ever replace it! And yet what could I do?
I wanted it. If it were to do again to-morrow,
I should do it. Yes, by Heaven! I should, be
the consequences what they might."

He paused, rose again, and replaced the mortgage
deed in the safe.

"If I only dared to burn it!" said he, with a
lingering glance at the fire. " Or if—-"

He took a letter from the table, and stood
looking for some moments at the signature.

"Oliver Behrens!" he mused. " A bold hand,
with something of the German character in that
little twist at the top of the O, easy to imitate;

but then the witnesses—- No, no, impossible!

Better expatriation than such a risk as that. If
the worst comes to the worst, there's always
America."

And with this he sank down into his chair
again, rested his chin upon his open palms, and
fell into a deep and silent train of thought.

CHAPTER III. RESOLVED.

As William Trefalden sat in his little dismal
private room, wearily thinking, the clouds in the
sky parted towards the west, and the last gleam
of daylight fell upon his face. Such a pale
eager face as it was, too, with a kind of strange
beauty in it that no merely vulgar eye would
have seen at all. To the majority of persons,
William Trefalden was simply a gentlemanly
"clever-looking" man. Attracted by the upright
wall of forehead, which literally overbalanced the
proportions of his face, they scarcely observed
the delicacy of his other features. The clear
pallor of his complexion, the subtle moulding of
his mouth and chin, were altogether disregarded
by those superficial observers. Even his eyes,
large, brown, luminous as they were, lost much
of their splendour beneath that superincumbent
weight of brow. His age was thirty-eight; but
he looked older. His hair was thick and dark,
and sprinkled lightly here and there with silver.
Though slender, he was particularly well made—
so well made, that it seemed impossible to him to
move ungracefully. His hands were white and
supple; his voice low; his manner grave and
polished. A very keen and practised eye might,
perhaps, have detected a singular sub-current of
nervous excitability beneath that gravity and
polish—a nervous excitability which it had been
the business of William Trefalden's whole life to
conquer and conceal, and which none of those
around him were Lavaters enough to discover.
The ice of a studied reserve had effectually
crusted over that fire. His own clerks, who
saw him daily for three hundred and thirteen
dreary days in every dreary year, had no more
notion of their employer's inner life than the
veriest strangers who brushed past him along
the narrow footway of Chancery-lane. They
saw him only as others saw him. They thought
of him only as others thought of him. They
knew that he had a profound and extensive
knowledge of his profession, an iron will, and an
inexhaustible reserve of energy. They knew
that he would sit chained to his desk for twelve
and fourteen hours at a time, when there was
urgent business to be done. They knew that he
wore a shabby coat, lunched every day on a
couple of dry biscuits, made no friends,
accepted no invitations, and kept his private
address a dead secret, even from his head clerk.
To them he was a grave, plodding, careful, clever
man, somewhat parsimonious as to his
expenditure, provokingly reticent as to his private
habits, and evidently bent on the
accumulation of riches. They were about as correct in
their conclusions, as the conclave of cardinals
which elected Pope Sixtus the Fifth for no
other merits than his supposed age and
infirmities.

Lost in anxious thought, William Trefalden
sat at his desk, in the same attitude, till dusk
came on, and the lamps were lighted in the
thoroughfare below. Once or twice he sighed,
or stirred uneasily; but his eyes never wandered
from their fixed stare, and his head was never
lifted from his hands. At length he seemed to
come to a sudden resolution. He rose, rang the
bell, crumpled up the memorandum which he
had written according to Mr. Behrens's
instructions, and flung it into the fire.

The door opened, and a red-headed clerk
made his appearance.

"Let my office lamp be brought," said Mr,
Trefalden, " and ask Mr. Keckwitch to step this
way."

The clerk vanished, and was succeeded by
Mr. Keckwitch, who came in with the lighted
lamp in his hand.

"Put the shade over it, Keckwitch," exclaimed
Mr. Trefalden, impatiently, as the glare fell full
upon his face. "It's enough to blind one!"

The head clerk obeyed slowly, looking at his
employer all the while from beneath his
eyelashes.

"You sent for me, sir?" he asked, huskily.

He was a short, fat, pallid man, with no more
neck than a Schiedam bottle. His eyes were
small and almost colourless. His ears had held
so many generations of pens that they stood out
from his head like the handles of a classic vase;
and his voice was always husky.

"Yes. Do you know where to lay your hand
upon that old copy of my great-grandfather's
will?"

'' Jacob Trefalden of Basinghall-street, seventeen
hundred and sixty?"

Mr. Trefalden nodded.

The head clerk took the subject into placid
consideration, and drummed thoughtfully with,
his fat fingers upon the most prominent portion
of his waistcoat.

"Well, sir," he admitted, after a brief pause,

"I won't say that I may not be able to
find it."

"Do so, if you please. Who is in the
office?"