I gave him his stick and my arm, and with my assistance he limped to the offices of the Bonfield Trust Company on the next block. When I returned to the bank the directors were talking excitedly, but at my entrance a hush fell, and they sat looking at me with a row of vacant, expectant faces that waited apparently to be filled with expression. "By ten o'clock to-morrow morning," I said, "a quarter of a million in cash will be brought in through the door in bags." "I told you he'd do it," exclaimed Bingley, as he grasped my hand, "and I hope to God it will stay 'em off." "You need a drink, Ben," observed Judge Kenton, "and so do I. Let's go and get it. A soft-boiled egg was all I had for breakfast, and I've gone faint." I remember that I went to a restaurant with him, that a few old women sitting on the curbing spoke to us as we passed, that we ate oysters, and returned in half an hour to another meeting, that we discussed ways and means until eight o'clock and decided nothing. I know also that when we came out again several of the old women were still crouching there, and that when they came whining up to me, I turned on them with an oath and ordered them to be off. As clearly as if it were yesterday, I can see still the long, solemn face of the Judge as he glanced up at me, and I see written upon it something of the faint wonder that I had grown to regard as the peculiar look of the Blands. I had telephoned Sally not to wait, and when I reached home I found that she had dismissed the servants and was preparing a little supper for me herself. While she served me, I sat perfectly silent, too exhausted to talk or to think, trying in vain to remember the more important events of the day. Only once did Sally speak, and that was to beg me to eat the slice of cold turkey she had laid on my plate. "I'm not hungry, I got something with Judge Kenton down town," I returned as I pushed back my chair and rose from the table; "what I need is sleep, sleep, sleep. If I don't get to bed, I'll drop to sleep on the hearth-rug." "Then go, dear," she answered, and not until I reached the landing above did I realise that through it all she had not put a single question to me. With the realisation I knew that I ought to have told her what in her heart she must have felt it to be her right to know; but a nervous shrinking, which seemed to be a result of my complete physical exhaustion, held me back when I started to retrace my steps.