Marble Company in the way of midnight suppers and unlimited champagne. There would be no wild uproarious companions, no gambling escapades, no perilous activities on the horizontal bar,--what war had Mr. Bonley waged against his attachment to the gymnasium!--no swimming-matches, no boat-races, no encounters with gloves or foils. Truly Mr. Bonley’s estate would be gracious indeed! No; Lucien Royce felt that his escape was a crowning mercy vouchsafed. His most imperative care should be to make it good, or he might well spend a decade of the best years of his life behind the bars for a crime he had not committed. His incarceration would easily be compassed, were his defense far more complete than perverse circumstance rendered possible, by the craft and persistence of men who had such large interests at stake on the life and well-being of a wild, adventurous, hairbrained boy. His supposititious death had saved his name, his commercial honor, which he held dear. John Grayson, with the theft of the belt and its treasure, had also taken his life--for he had no life left! He was dead! He was very dead! And let the Gerault Bonley Marble Company mourn him. With a laughing sneer on his face, he cursed again, as he had cursed a thousand times, the plastic folly, or the vagary of chance, or whatever fate it was that induced him to lend himself to the broker’s scheme; for although he had thought it a mere formality, it had in effect sold him into a species of slavery for the rest of his natural life. “But is not my advice good advice?” Mr. Bonley had more than once urged upon his recalcitrant mood. “Is it not in your _own_ interests as well as in ours? Is it not exactly the advice I would give to my own son?” “He needs it. Give it to _him_,” the _cestui que vie_ would reply in flippant despair. But Mr. Bonley’s son was not worth so much money to the company, and he went his own ways with some celerity, all unchecked.