In this state then, with his brain cells divided in their allegiance to him and his rebellious body in a tremor of torment, he was called upon very soon after his arrival at the office to carry out an important commission for the man who had bestowed upon him his temporary promotion. Taking the command over the wire, he hurried upstairs to execute it. Had he been comparatively drunk it is certain that Hemburg would have made no slip; automatically his fuddled mind would have governed his hand to mechanical obedience of the direction. But being comparatively sober--as sober as nearly twenty-four hours of abstinence could make him--poor Hemburg was in a swirl of mental confusion. At that, out-mastered as he was, he made only one mistake. There were two stories lying in type, side by side, on the stone. One of them was to be played up in the leading position in the make-up. The other was to be dumped in the hell-box. That was the order, plain enough in his own mind. So one of them he dumped, and the other one he put in the forms to be printed. The mistake he made was this: He dumped the wrong one and he ran the wrong one. He dumped the long Washington dispatch into a heap of metal linotype strips, fit only to be melted back again into leaden bars, and he ran the Singlebury masterpiece. That's what Hemburg did--that's all. * * * * * Well then, these things resulted: Mrs. Foxman lost her ten-thousand-dollar legacy and never thereafter forgave her husband for frittering away the inheritance in what she deemed to have been a mad fit of witless speculation. Even though his money had gone with hers she never forgave him. Mr. Foxman, having sold his birthright of probity and honour and self-respect for as bitter and disappointing a mess of pottage as ever mortal man had to swallow, nevertheless went undetected in his crookedness and continued to hold his job as managing editor of _The Clarion_.