Finally he rose and walked to his private safe, and, after fumbling with stiff fingers over the combination, opened it and took out a small iron box which he carried to the desk. Then, sitting down before it, he drew off his fur gloves and took out the neat piles of memoranda and the papers which it contained. There was nothing to be done to them, for his affairs had, for years, been perfectly ordered; but he read over the carefully listed securities as though he expected to find some mistake. The lists were long, for he was rich; not so immoderately rich, it is true, as he would have been, had there been a generous admixture of daring with his great shrewdness and caution, but still rich enough to count his fortune by the millions. After a while, he laid the other papers back in the box, moved it a little to one side to make room, spread a large document out flat on the desk and bent over it, rubbing his cramped old hands together between his knees, and smiling faintly. Yes, there could be no doubt about it; it was sane, it was clear, it was inviolable; it would hold safe the thing he loved best, from rash hands that would recklessly destroy it. * * * * * In a small, snug room in young John Bagsbury’s house, by courtesy a library, though one modest case held all its books, John and Dick Haselridge were talking, or, rather, John was talking, while Dick listened. They were on opposite sides of the big desk that occupied the middle of the room, John in the easy-chair, and Dick in the swivel chair that stood before the desk, where she could make little pencil sketches on the blotter. They were alone, for Martha, John’s thirteen-year-old daughter, had gone to bed long ago, and Alice, who always grew sleepy very soon after John began talking shop, had followed her. It was by no means the first of the long talks John and Dick had had together, for he had not been slow to discover and delight in her swift comprehension and her honest appreciation of the turns and twists of his business. There was no affectation in her display of interest, for the active side of life, the exercise of judgment and skill, appealed to her very strongly. But to-night the talk had taken another turn, and, somewhat to his own alarm, John found himself telling her about his gloomy boyhood, his disappointment in his father’s bank, and the ambition which had driven him out of it. His talk revealed to Dick more than he knew; for between the words she could read how the still unfulfilled ambition was not dead, but stronger than ever; how the successes of all those years meant nothing to him, except as they hastened the time when he should have the policy of Bagsbury and Company’s Savings Bank in his own hands.