First of all there was Beaumont's theory, and the horror of the thought gripped his heart like a frozen hand. It stood like some grim demon barring the only truthful and honorable way out of the matter. How could he go back and say that he had been robbed. Beaumont would laugh the idea to scorn and gloat over the confirmation of his protest. Little would explanation avail. His friends would turn against him, and join with Beaumont, and seek to make the severity of their accusation against him atone for their previous trust and confidence, and their disregard of what they would now characterize as Mr. Beaumont's unusual foresight. And then, if they would listen to explanation, what explanation was there to make? He had left their counting-house with the money in the afternoon, and now in New York in the evening he claimed to have been robbed. And how? That some one had substituted another hand-bag for the one with which he started, without attacking him and even without his slightest suspicion--a probable story indeed! Why, the hand-bag there on the table was almost exactly like the one he had taken with him to the company's office. No one but himself could tell that it was not the same bag. The whole matter would be considered a shrewd trick on his part,--a cunningly arranged scheme to rob his employers of this large sum of money. In his heated fancy he could see the whole future as it would come. The hard smile of incredulity with which his story would be greeted,--the arrest that would follow,--the sensational newspaper reports of the defalcation of Carper Harris, confidential clerk of the great wholesale house of Beaumont, Milton, & Company. The newspapers would assume his guilt, as they always do when one is charged with crime; they would speak of him as a defaulter, and would comment on the story as an ingenious defence emanating from his shrewd counsel. Even the newsboys on the street would convict him with the cry of, "All about the trial of the great defaulter!" The jury its very self, when it went into the box, would be going there to try a man already convicted of crime. This conviction would have been forced upon them by the reports, and they could not entirely escape from it, no matter how hard they might try. Why, if one of them should be asked suddenly what he was doing, in all possibility, if he should reply without stopping to think, he would answer that he was trying the man who had robbed Beaumont, Milton, & Company. So that way was barred, and it was a demon with a flaming sword that kept it.