een here every night for a week, pestering me
almost to death, when I'm sick. He's fretting what little life there is
left to me out of my body."

"Why, what's the matter with him?"

"He wants money--all I've got in the world, if I'll give it to him. He
says he shall be ruined if he can't get it."

"Indeed!"

"I don't know nothin' about it, but he says something's wrong in the
firm. He wants forty thousand dollars, and must have it, or be ruined
and disgraced. Don't you tell a soul what I'm saying to you, Philip."

A flood of light was suddenly cast in upon my perplexed understanding.
Forty thousand dollars! That was about the amount of the mysterious
invoices. After this revelation I had no difficulty in believing that
Mr. Whippleton had been using the money of the firm in his private land
speculations. The invoices were fictitious, and this explanation showed
me why the junior partner did not wish me to mention them to any one. I
even thought I comprehended the nature of Mr. Whippleton's sudden
illness when I showed him my trial balance. Now he was trying to get
the money from his mother to make good his accounts with the firm.

I was grieved and amazed at the revelation thus forced upon me. I
understood the old lady's principles, or rather her want of principles,
and granting that she had given him her code of worldly wisdom, as she
had to me, it was not strange that he should turn out to be a thief and
a swindler. However hard and disgusting it may seem, there was
something like poetic justice in his coming to her upon her sick bed,
perhaps her dying bed, to demand the means of repairing his frauds. I
pitied my landlady in her deep distress, but surely worldly wisdom
could produce no different result.

[Illustration: PHIL RECEIVES THE OLD LADY'S TREASURE. Page 129.]

"See here, Philip," she continued, raising her head with difficulty
from the pillow, and taking from beneath it a great leather
pocket-book, distended by its contents. "There's seven thousand
dollars, besides notes and bonds for twenty-three thousand more, in
it."

"Why do you keep so much money in the house, Mrs. Whippleton? It isn't
safe."

"I know that; I had it in the bank till Charles began to pester me, and
then I drew it all out the very day I was taken sick."

"But it was safe in the bank."

"No, 'twan't. I was afraid Charles would forge a check and draw it."

"He wouldn't do such a thing as that."

"I hope he wouldn't, but I w