Small beads of moisture broke out on the bald part of Joseph Hutchinson's head. He had been first so flattered and exhilarated by the quoting of large figures, and then so flustrated and embarrassed by his inability to calculate and follow argument, and again so soothed and elated and thrilled by his own importance in the scheme and the honors which his position in certain companies would heap upon him, that an abyss had yawned before him of which he had been wholly unaware. He was not unaware of it now. He was a vainglorious, ignorant man, whose life had been spent in common work done under the supervision of those who knew what he did not know. He had fed himself upon the comforting belief that he had learned all the tricks of any trade. He had been openly boastful of his astuteness and experience, and yet, as Ann's soft little voice went on, and she praised his cleverness in seeing one point after another, he began to quake within himself before the dawning realization that he had seen none of them, that he had been carried along exactly as Rosenthal had intended that he should be, and that if luck had not intervened, he had been on the brink of signing his name to an agreement that would have implied a score of concessions he would have bellowed like a bull at the thought of making if he had known what he was doing. “Aye, lass,” he gulped out when he could speak--“aye, lass, tha wert right enow. I'm glad tha wert there and heard it, and saw what I was thinking. I didn't say much. I let the chap have rope enow to hang himself with. When he comes back I'll give him a bit o' my mind as'll startle him. It was right-down clever of thee to see just what I had i' my head about all that there gab about things as didn't matter, an' the leavin' out them as did--thinking I wouldn't notice. Many's the time I've said, `It is na so much what's put into a contract as what's left out.' I'll warrant tha'st heard me say it thysen.” “I dare say I have,” answered Ann, “and I dare say that was why it came into my mind.” “That was it,” he answered. “Thy mother was always tellin' me of things I'd said that I'd clean forgot myself.” He was beginning to recover his balance and self-respect. It would have been so like a Lancashire chap to have seen and dealt shrewdly with a business schemer who tried to outwit him that he was gradually convinced that he had thought all that had been suggested, and had comported himself with triumphant though silent astuteness. He even began to rub his hands. “I'll show him,” he said, “I'll send him off with a flea in his ear.”