During the luncheon hour, as he sat in the empty counting-house, with his paper of bread-and-butter untouched, and his head buried in desolation in his weak and nerveless hands, he was startled back to sensibility by feeling a hand laid suddenly upon his shoulder. It was that of James Dodson. His mentor’s forlorn aspect, of a few hours before, had yielded place to a kind of jubilation. “What do you think, my son?” said this consummate man of action, “what do you think, old boy? I have positively persuaded that silly old cuckoo that he never left the money there at all.” William Jordan gave a gasp. “I--I d-don’t think it m-matters,” he stammered. “You don’t think if matters!” said Jimmy Dodson. “Why, my good Christian boy, you must be up the pole. Don’t you realize what an escape it has been for us both? But I must have the devil’s own tongue on me; if J. Dodson doesn’t end his days with a peerage in Grosvenor Square, I don’t know what two and two make, that’s all. I never understood, until to-day, how easy it is to argue some chaps clean out of their own reason. I’ve always despised the old fool; but even I never realized what a nincompoop he was until this blessed morning. He arrived about ten, as he always does, and when he rang for me and I came in, I thought, ‘Hullo, old friend, you look uncommonly sorry for yourself, you do.’ Well, the old boy blew his nose very violently, and cocked his glass in his right eye very fiercely, and he bleated like a kid of three, ‘Mr. Dodson, this affair is preying upon me. This great establishment was founded by my ancestor, Octavius Crumpett, in 1701. This house has published Dryden and Pope, Swift and Fielding, and all the foremost names in the literary history of this country until the present time. And I think, Mr. Dodson, I am justified in saying that an incident of this kind is quite without precedent in its annals. Such a reflection as is cast upon its personnel by this deplorable occurrence is--is, well, Mr. Dodson, more than I can contemplate.’ And that is where I came in again, my son. ‘Well, sir,’ I said, ‘you must forgive me if I repeat what I said yesterday afternoon, that you have not made it ab-so-lutely clear to my mind that the money was actually there. I don’t know whether you have noticed it, sir, but what you might call hallucinations are constantly occurring. How often, sir, do we persuade ourselves that we have not done a thing when we have done it, and _vice versa_! And you’ll pardon me, sir, but these scientific people say it is the same with disease. You can think you have got a disease until you get it; or, again, if you can persuade yourself you have not got a disease you have got, why, sir, in the course of time you find you have not got it after all.’