Then the policy of the house changed. The manager’s salary was cut down; he was no longer called into the confidences of the firm. His wife remembered with hot cheeks and clenched hands how that had hurt him. It was the thought that they could have done it; he would have lived on a pittance willingly if they had needed money. But he defended them, of course; it was his way. He was a very proud man, so proud that his friends’ honour was as his very own; who doubted it, insulted him. And then—ah, that was hardest! to know that what you love is rotten at the core. That man had no business to tell her husband, but every one in the house told George more even of their own private affairs than he cared to hear. Nothing that went on, for or against their prospects, for or against the good of the business, nay, for or against himself, but was brought to his knowledge for comfort, advice, or denial. He had always borne his full freight of other people’s troubles. But this thing—— His wife knew how the burden of it had brought the beginning of his illness. It struck at the life of the firm; they had survived, but the blow had killed him. They had used his honesty to cheat with, and had offered him as the sacrifice when they were on the point of detection. Johnson, who partly in horror, partly in protesting doubt, had shown him, with trembling adjurations to utter secrecy, the incriminating paper, did not know that George held the other half of the clue. To have used it in his own defense was to betray one who trusted him, and defile the fair name of the firm. His widow clasped the envelope tighter in her hands. She had been to her husband the priestess of his heart’s inmost confessional; he had given her a sacred confidence. But her whole soul rose in rebellion to the thought that her boy was to be sacrificed as her husband had been, with no hand upraised to help him. Her hand was small, but it held a mighty truth in it! All the sense of wrong, and yearning heart-break of years, surged within, to bring with them a fierce avenging joy. Her promise to her husband? He had not known to what it would bind her; she felt herself fully absolved. Nelson and White, Nelson and White, their day of reprisal had come at last. The powerful fetich of their name would crumble into dust, when she struck it! The dingy brick building with its gaping doorway gave her a shock as she came suddenly upon it. She had not seen it for over two years. That was the doorway under which George used to pass, the steep, worn, wooden staircase, that up which he was wont to climb daily. She had sometimes stopped here for him on her way home. She held her breath with a sickness of heart as she traversed the familiar ways again, looking perforce in at the windowed door behind which his desk _used_ to stand. She was to climb higher to-day, to the sacred rooms of the Firm, the mighty power that had brought into being those rows and rows of clerks at the desks below.