Produced by David Widger YOUNG MR. BARTER’S REPENTANCE By David Christie Murray Author Of ‘Aunt Rachel,’ ‘The Weaker Vessel,’ Etc. I Mr Bommaney was a British merchant of the highest rectitude and the most spotless reputation. He traded still under the name of Bommaney, Waite, and Co., though Waite had been long since dead, and the Company had gone out of existence in his father’s time. The old offices, cramped and inconvenient, in which the firm had begun life eighty years before, were still good enough for Mr. Bommaney, and they had an air of solid respectability which newer and flashier places lacked. The building of which they formed a part stood in Coalporter’s Alley, opposite the Church of St. Mildred, and the hum of the City’s traffic scarcely sounded in that retired and quiet locality. Mr. Bommaney himself was a man of sixty, hale and hearty, with a rosy face and white whiskers. He was a broad-shouldered man, inclining to be portly, and he was currently accepted as a man of an indomitable will. There was no particular reason for the popular belief in his determination apart from the fact that it was a favourite boast of his that nothing ever got him down. On all occasions and in all companies he was wont to declare that no conceivable misfortune could really break a man of spirit. He confessed to a pitying sympathy for mealy-willed people (and everybody knew that Bommaney, in spite of his own strength of mind, was one of the kindliest creatures in the world); but, whenever he met a man in trouble, he would clip him by the shoulder, and would say, in his own hearty fashion, ‘You must look the thing in the face, my boy. Look it in the face. I’d never let anything break _me_ down.’ Since his reputation for fortitude was as solid and as old-fashioned amongst the people who knew him as his business character itself, it would have come as something of a shock upon any of his friends if he could but have been seen by them, or any credible man amongst them, on a certain afternoon in the April of 1880. He had locked himself in his own room, and, sitting there in a big chair before a businesslike desk, with a great number of docketed papers in pigeon-holes, and a disordered mass of papers strewn before him, the determined Mr. Bommaney, the decided Mr. Bommaney, the Mr. Bommaney whom no misfortune could subdue, was crying, very feebly and quietly, and was mopping his rosy cheeks, and blowing his nose in an utter and unrestraining abandonment to trouble.