He sat on a high office stool writing on the malodorous page of an enormous ledger, looking for all the world like a diminutive office boy on whom some one has fitted, in cruel jest, a hoary head. If the calendars on his walls were trustworthy witnesses, he was agent for half the insurance companies in the British Isles. Autolycus was Sylvester’s other name. He reverenced his ledger as other men reverence the Bible. He kept no other diary, for the ledger was his book of life, and when Sam burst upon him he was absorbed in his records. He closed the book mechanically through pure secretive habit, and closed into it just enough of his wits to put him at a disadvantage with Sam. Sam gave no quarter. “Mr. Verity,” he gasped before he was fairly in the room. “Simpson’s Buildings... the title-deeds... here, or has Mr. Verity got them?” It succeeded. Lamputt took him for an urgent special messenger from Verity. “If Mr. Verity’s memory is going,” he said with dignity, “mine is not. The title-deeds are in the third drawer of his safe in his office.” “In his name?” asked Sam quickly. “Of course,” said Lamputt, and then, too late, became suspicious. “I say,” he began, “what-------?” But Sam had gone, and though Mr. Lamputt reached his hat and the door in one bound and careered down his familiar stairs like the office boy his figure aped, Sam had turned a corner and was lost to sight. Lamputt raced to Verity’s office, only to find that the alderman was then attending a Council meeting. Lamputt could do no more, indeed for a man with a weak heart he had already done too much: but he had a strong foreknowledge of the wrath of Alderman Verity, and goes, an unhappy, shrinking figure, out of this story to an unknown fate. Sam went to the Town Hall with his bomb-shell, and they disapprove of bombs at Council meetings, so he was sedulous to spare their feelings. He supported that part of the resolution which referred to the erection of Baths, but proposed that it should stand alone and that the naming of a site should be deferred. Curiously, his proposal made the Conservative majority very angry: the resolution was one and indivisible. Sam regretted that in order to vote against the misuse of a particular site, he was forced to vote against the Baths, but standing as he did for purity in civic life, detesting the very shadow of jobbery, he had no alternative but to move that the resolution be rejected. Here was a proposal which, however innocent its wording, did in fact imply that ratepayers’ money was to be handed over to a prominent member of the party opposite, to a gentleman in whose safe, at whose office, in the third drawer of the safe, were deposited at that moment the title-deeds of the property whose acquisition by the city was suggested. He abhorred personalities, he shrank from mentioning a name, and if the second part of the resolution were withdrawn, he----