"That’s very kind of you, Bob; but may I suggest that you’ll have all you can do in repenting of your own sins without trying, in addition, to repent of mine?" Nevertheless, when the minute came the parting was affectionate. Neither father nor son was satisfied with a handshake. Throwing their arms about each other, they kissed as in the days when Bob was a little boy. Perhaps it was the warmth of this farewell that induced the father, on arriving at the bank, to ask Miss Ruddick to invite Mr. Bickley to the private office in case he should look round that afternoon. Mr. Bickley did look round that afternoon and was accordingly ushered in. He was a delicately built man whose appearance produced that effect of accuracy you get from a steel trap. Constructed to do a certain kind of work, it can do that work and no other. Two minutes after Bickley had looked at a man, he knew both his weak points and his aptitudes, and could tell to a nicety the job it was best to put him to. Forehead, nose, jaw, lips, eyes, and ears were to him as the letters of the alphabet. More than once he had transferred a teller to the accounting department, or made an accountant a detective by his reading of facial lines. Having put his man in an armchair and given him one of the Havanas he kept for social intercourse, Collingham waited for the mellow moment when the cigar was smoked to half its length. "Do you know, Bickley," he said then, "I’ve never been quite at ease in my mind about the way we shelved that old fellow, Follett. It seems to me we showed—well, let us call it a want of consideration." Bickley’s eyes measured what was left of his cigar as he held it out before him horizontally. "Consideration for whom, Mr. Collingham?" "For the old man himself." "Oh, I didn’t know but what you were going to say for your stockholders." Before the banker could parry this thrust, the expert went on: "I looked in yesterday at the court room where they were trotting out that fellow Nicholson of the Wyndham National. If they’d ever asked me, I could have told them long ago that they’d lose money by him in the end." "Oh, but Follett isn’t in that box." "He is, if you drop money by him. I’m speaking not of the ways you drop money by a man, but only of the fact that you drop it. Your business, I suppose, Mr. Collingham, is to make money for your shareholders and yourself. It’s to help out that, I take it, that you send for me and go by my advice." "Then you’d class Follett and Nicholson together?" "I don’t class them at all. Whether a man steals the bank’s money or you give it to him as a gift isn’t to the point. My job is over when I tell you that he gets what he doesn’t earn. The rest, Mr. Collingham, is up to you—or the district attorney, as the case may be." "I’m afraid I don’t see it that way."