He was not, and never had been, a great reader; he gave up his mind to pursuits which he found more attractive than the tranquil fields and lanes of literature. Yet he remembered, in a dim sort of way, either that he had read somewhere in his schoolboy days, or that a fanciful old nurse had told him, a story of a person somewhere, who, being possessed of a great chest of money, went one day to look at it, and found that his hard cash had changed to withered leaves. Precisely such a transformation had overtaken that eight thousand pounds, at the moment when it had fallen from the hands of a man who might have made an honest use of it. The fable was, and was not, true, so far as he remembered, and his fancy dwelt curiously about the history. There was no possibility of turning back the withered leaves to gold, and making them jingle and glitter again as only one’s own ready money can jingle and glitter. But, useless as these crisp and rustling leaves of paper were to him, they held still all their old potentialities, and in the hands of honest men or courageous rascals each leaf might still transmute itself into a hundred golden emblems of sovereignty and power. He was neither that honest man nor that courageous rascal, and the money grew to be a sort of devilish tantalising fetish to him. Before he had owned it a fortnight, he had felt a hundred times he could have burned it out of the exasperation of mere spite against it. He heard, of course, of Bommaney’s flight, and of the failure of the old-established business house. People talked about these things a good deal for a time, and he himself listened to and took part in many speculations as to Bommaney’s whereabouts, and the means he would take to get rid of the notes and make them available for his own purposes. He found it at first a little trying to the nerves. There was nothing, since Bommaney had accepted his own disgrace and run away, to connect young Mr. Barter with the lost eight thousand pounds, yet it took much courage, and a considerable amount of inward spurring, to bring himself to talk about the business. When a man carries a secret of a quite harmless nature, it happens often, as almost everybody knows, that casual words and quite innocent glances startle him with hints of understanding and participation. What is it when the detection of the secret involves open shame and penal servitude? Can a man of genuine courage be a thief? Is not courage after all at the very bottom of all manly honour, of all sound honesty, all true self-respect? How shall a thief be other than a lurking cur, whose whole soul, such as it is, is bent to a mean suspicion that he is suspected, a continuous terror-stricken watchfulness, a sleeping and waking dread of an awful hand-clap on the shoulder? There are constitutional differences in thieves, no doubt, as there are in other people, but the key-note of the dishonest man’s whole thought is fear. When, after a day or two, young Mr.