nswer. He passed down the hall, down the stairs, and out into the
street.

McBride's was directly opposite on the corner of High Street and the
Square; a mean two-story structure of frame, across the shabby front of
which hung a shabby creaking sign bearing witness that within might be
found: "Archibald McBride, Hardware and Cutlery, Implements and Bar
Iron." McBride had kept store on that corner time out of mind.

He was an austere unapproachable old man, having no relatives of whom
any one knew; with few friends and fewer intimates; a rich man,
according to the Mount Hope standard, and a miser according to the Mount
Hope gossip, with the miser's traditional suspicion of banks. It was
rumored that he had hidden away vast sums of money in his dingy store,
or in the closely-shuttered rooms above, where the odds and ends of the
merchandise in which he dealt had accumulated in rusty and neglected
heaps.

The old man wore an air of mystery, and this air of mystery extended to
his place of business. It was dark and dirty and ill-kept. On the
brightest summer day the sunlight stole vaguely in through grimy
cobwebbed windows. The dust of years had settled deep on unused shelves
and, in abandoned corners, and whole days were said to pass when no one
but the ancient merchant himself entered the building. Yet in spite of
the trade that had gone elsewhere he had grown steadily richer year by
year.

When North entered the store he found McBride busy with his books in his
small back office, a lean black cat asleep on the desk at his elbow.

"Good afternoon, John!" said the old merchant as he turned from his high
desk, removing as he did so a pair of heavy steel-rimmed spectacles,
that dominated a high-bridged nose which in turn dominated a wrinkled
and angular face.

"I thought I should find you here!" said North.

"You'll always find me here of a week-day," and he gave the young fellow
the fleeting suggestion of a smile. He had a liking for North, whose
father, years before, had been one of the few friends he had made in
Mount Hope.

The Norths had been among the town's earliest settlers, John's
grandfather having taken his place among the pioneers when Mount Hope
had little but its name to warrant its place on the map. At his death
Stephen, his only son, assumed the family headship, married, toiled,
thrived and finished his course following his wife to the old
burying-ground after a few lonely heart-breaking months, and