Try to imagine just what the bank meant to John Bagsbury. He was more of a man than his father before him had been, he had more humanity in him; but like the withered old miser who had died over his desk, John had put well-nigh all he had into this creature whose birth had been the signing of a bit of parchment by a state official. His fortune was in it, his ambition was in it, his credit with the world of trade, his commercial honor, if you will allow me, was in it. His common honesty he had put above it, before it. He would have been the last man on earth to think of repeating-- “--loved I not honor more,” in that connection,--and I fancy I see you smiling over the notion,--yet, allowing for the translation into the unromantic, sordid life of the “street,” that had been precisely the significance of his flat refusal to sell out Pickering, and of his grimly accepting Sponley’s challenge. But his was not the sort of mind to find any consolation in the nobility of a sentiment; his honor was not self-conscious. So if you remember how he had passed his boyhood in that squat old building half a square away, and can guess at what had been his feeling toward it during the third of his lifetime he had spent elsewhere in preparation for his return to it, you can understand why the sight he saw halted his heart as it halted his feet, and then sent it hammering on, almost to bursting. It was nothing but a little group of people, fifteen men, perhaps, and five or six women, standing on the steps, some of them peering through the glass doors in the futile attempt to see around the shades which hung behind. The crowd grew half again as large while John was walking the half square from the corner. In the glance he cast about as he walked through he recognized Sponley’s coachman. As he was going up the stairs, he heard some one say in an undertone,-- “That’s Bagsbury; I thought you told me he’d run off with all the money.” “That’s what a fellow told me,” returned another voice. “Is that Bagsbury, sure enough?” John closed the door behind him quickly, walked the length of the short passage, and once in a big dingy room looked about with a heavy scowl. You could have told from the faces, from the very attitudes of the clerks as they were settling to their day’s work, that there was a crowd in the street. “Mr. Peters,” John called. Peters was the man who did the work for which Curtin received his salary. “Mr. Peters, I think you had better bring those people in and pay them their money at once. I wish you’d done it before now.” “They can’t be paid yet, Mr. Bagsbury. The time-lock on the vaults is set for nine o’clock. It’s only quarter of.” John looked at his watch. “I’d no idea it was so early,” he said. He walked away half a dozen paces and then returned. “Don’t begin then till flat ten o’clock. It seems we’re in for a crowd, anyway, and there’s no use telling them that we’re afraid of one.”