Adam Vallory nodded. “It can come to nothing, of course. Lucille, herself, would be the first to insist that one with her affliction has no right to become a wife and mother. Yet it has been a great comfort to her to have Oswald dropping in at odd moments, or for an evening. He understands her thoroughly, shares her keen love for music, and all that. He has even taught her to play chess and to do a number of things that we have never thought she was able to attempt. For her sake we mustn’t drag him into this mess of ours, David.” This hesitantly given explanation opened a new field of dismay for David Vallory. As it seemed, there was a separate and distinct disaster reaching out for each member of the little family of three persons; the grim threat hanging over his father, the indefinite postponement of his own embryo love affair, and now this portentous problem of Lucille’s happiness. His love for the blind sister was deep and tender, as it should have been, and at the moment his own affair shrank to inconsequence, as it was constrained to when he realized how heavily the blow would fall upon one who had been sheltered and protected in every way. “You have fully made up your mind to wire for the examiner to-night?” he asked, after another interval filled with blind gropings for a helpful suggestion. Adam Vallory looked away toward the window and through it to the empty country-town street beyond. “There is no use in prolonging the agony, David. The day of reckoning has come, and a few hours one way or another can make no possible difference. I shall have to face the music in the end; we shall all three have to face it, more is the pity. If there were the slenderest chance of escape----” The interruption, voices in the adjoining banking room, gruff tones raised emphatically, and Winkle’s more moderate ones parroting excuses and explanations came over the half-height partition of the rear office. It culminated now in an abrupt opening of the door of privacy. The intruder, whom Winkle had apparently been trying to bar out, was a big man with a clean-shaven face in which each feature seemed to have been massively exaggerated to make it harmonize with the gigantic figure; a great Roman beak of a nose; a hard-bitted mouth buttressed by a jaw over which the heavy cheeks hung like the dewlaps of a bulldog; strong teeth clamping the blackest of cigars; shrewd eyes that glared from beneath penthouse brows; in short, a man who, in the Stone Age, would have acquired the most commodious of the caves and swung the heaviest of the clubs.