im across town to the office where Dudley Stone worked. At
first the old man peered all about, on the watch for Fenwick Grimes or his
clerk.

"They have been after me every few days to agree to leave New York. I did
not know what for, but I knew Fenwick was up to some game. He always _was_
up to some game, even when we were young fellows together.

"Now he is rich, and he might have found me better lodgings and something
to do. But after I came back from the South and was unfit to do clerical
work because of my eyes, he only threw me a dollar now and then--like
throwing a bone to a starving dog."

That explained how Helen had chanced to see the old man at Fenwick
Grimes's door on the occasion of her visit to her father's old partner.
And later, in the presence of Dudley Stone--who was almost as eager as
Helen herself--the old man related the facts that served to explain the
whole mystery surrounding the trouble that had darkened Prince Morrell's
life for so long.

Briefly, Allen Chesterton and Fenwick Grimes had grown up together in the
same town, as boys had come to New York, and had kept in touch with each
other for years. Neither had married and for years they had roomed
together.

But Chesterton was a plodding bookkeeper and would never be anything else.
Grimes was mad for money, but he was always complaining that he never had
a chance.

His chance came through Willets Starkweather, when the latter's
brother-in-law was looking for a working partner--a man right in Grimes's
line, and who was a good salesman. Grimes got into the firm on very
limited capital, yet he was a trusted member and Prince Morrell depended
on his judgment in most things.

Allen Chesterton had been brought into the firm's office to keep the books
through Grimes's influence, of course. By and by it seemed to Chesterton
that his old comrade was running pretty close to the wind. The bookkeeper
feared that _he_ might be involved in some dubious enterprise.

There was flung in Chesterton's way (perhaps _that_ was by the influence
of Grimes, too) a chance to go to New Orleans to be bookkeeper in a
shipping firm. He could get passage upon a vessel belonging to the firm.

He had this to decide between the time of leaving the office one afternoon
and early the next morning. He took the place and bundled his things
aboard, leaving a letter for Fenwick Grimes. That letter, it is needless
to say, Grimes never made public. And by the time the slow