Slowly as their fortune piled up, and people said they had a million, his brown beard grizzled a little, and his brow crept up and up and his girth stretched out to forty-four. But his hands did not whiten or soften, and though he was "Honest John," and every quarter-section of land that he bought doubled in value by some magic that he only seemed to know, he kept the habits of his youth, rose early, washed at the kitchen basin, and was the first man at his office in the morning. At night, after a hard day's work he smoked a cob-pipe in the basement, where he could spit into the furnace and watch the fire until nine o'clock, when he put out the cat and bedded down the fire, while "Ma" set the buckwheat cakes. They never had a servant in their house. We used to see John Markley pass the office window a dozen times a day, a hale, vigorous man, whose heels clicked hard on the sidewalk as he came hurrying along--head back and shoulders rolling. He was a powerful, masculine, indomitable creature, who looked out of defiant, cold, unblinking eyes as though he were just about to tell the whole world to go to hell! The town was proud of him. He was our "prominent citizen," and when he was elected president of the district bankers' association, and his name appeared in the papers as a possible candidate for United States Senator or Minister to Mexico or Secretary of the Interior, we were glad that "Honest John Markley" was our fellow-townsman. And then came the crash. Man is a curious creature, and, even if he is nine parts good, the old Adam in him must burn out one way or another in his youth, or there comes a danger period at the height of his middle life when his submerged tenth that has been smouldering for years flares up and destroys him. Wherefore the problem which we have never been able to solve, though we have talked it over in the office a dozen times: whether John Markley had begun to feel, before he met the Hobart woman, that he wasn't getting enough out of life for the money he had invested in it; or whether she put the notion in his head.