"And this is final?" The face of Frank Mansfield was very pale as he spoke. "It is. Reform your habits of life, go to work and advance yourself, make money somehow, anyhow, so that you make it, and then, if Edna has not previously found some one more worthy of her, as I have no doubt she will, I will give your proposal the consideration it deserves. Now I must bid you good-night." Without a word the young man turned upon his heel and passed out of the office. Listening for a moment to his retreating footsteps as they died away through the corridor, Mr. Elijah Callister arose, drew on his overcoat, adjusted his shiny beaver at the proper angle upon his head, and taking up his walking stick, prepared to start for his palatial home with a general air of respectable business solidity standing forth from every portion of his portly presence from the crown of his hat to the soles of his well-polished shoes. "That settles him for the day," he muttered, as he cast his eye about the office to see that everything was as it should be for the night; "by to-morrow, unless I greatly mistake, the young gentleman will have most effectually settled himself. I have nothing against Frank, nothing in the world, but of late he has become altogether too inquisitive, and there is nothing for it but to remove him from my path." "Though I don't doubt in the least," he added, meditatively, as he locked the office door behind him, "that when she hears what has happened, she will kick up a deuce of a row." And the respectable Mr. Callister, the last man in the world who among the brethren of the Tenth Baptist Church on Murray Hill, in which he was a bright and shining light, would have been suspected of such a thing, stepped into the elevator, passed out of the nine-story building into Broad street, and, slipping around the corner into a little alley, hurriedly descended the steps of a basement groggery, and walking up to the bar, called for as stiff a glass of brandy as any old toper in the land. "Has Billy Cutts, the detective, been in here this evening, Joe?" he asked of the white-aproned bartender, as he set down the brandy glass which he had drained to the last drop. "No, he hasn't, Mr. Callister," was the man's reply. "I haven't seen Billy in more'n a---- By gracious! talk of angels, and they are right on top of you! Here's Billy Cutts comin' now." As he spoke a young man, comfortably dressed in a dark overcoat and ordinary business suit, entered the saloon. He was to all appearance not over twenty-two or twenty-three years of age, but his face bore indelibly stamped upon it a knowledge of the crooked ways of the great city not usually looked for in a man of his years. He shook hands with the stock operator upon his entrance, with a familiar, easy-going air, both withdrawing at once to a table in a remote corner of the saloon, upon which, by the order of the elder man, the bartender placed a bottle and glasses between them.