nto the
breakfast-room, and set her down in her easy-chair. He was bending over
her to ask her if her ride had done her good, when a servant entered and
handed him a letter marked "Immediate."

He read it, and all the color of the winter's day faded out of his face.

"I've got to go down to Van Riper's," he said, "at once; he wants me."

"Has anything happened to--to Eustace?" his wife cried out.

"He doesn't say so--I suppose--I suppose it's only business of some
sort," her husband said. His face was white. "Don't detain me, dear.
I'll come back as soon as--as soon as I get through."

He kissed her, and was gone. Half an hour later he sat in the office of
Abram Van Riper's Son.

There was no doubting it, no denying it, no palliating it even. The
curse had come upon the house of Jacob Dolph, and his son was a thief
and a fugitive.

It was an old story and a simple story. It was the story of the
Haskins's million and the Dolphs' hundred thousand; it was the story of
the boy with a hundred thousand in prospect trying to spend money
against the boy with a million in sight. It was the story of cards,
speculation--another name for that sort of gambling which is worse than
any on the green cloth--and what is euphemistically known as wine.

There was enough oral and documentary evidence to make the whole story
hideously clear to Jacob Dolph, as he sat in that dark little pen of Van
Riper's and had the history of his son's fall spelled out to him, word
by word. The boy had proved himself apt and clever in his office work.
His education had given him an advantage over all the other clerks, and
he had learned his duties with wonderful ease. And when, six months
before, old Mr. Daw had let himself down from his stool for the last
time, and had muffled up his thin old throat in his great green worsted
scarf, and had gone home to die, young Dolph had been put temporarily in
his place. In those six months he had done his bad work. Even Van Riper
admitted that it must have been a sudden temptation. But--he had
yielded. In those six months fifty thousand dollars of Abram Van Riper's
money had gone into the gulf that yawned in Wall Street; fifty thousand
dollars, not acquired by falsifying the books, but filched outright from
the private safe to which he had access; fifty thousand dollars, in
securities which he had turned into money, acting as the confidential
man of the house.

When Jacob Dolph, looking like a man of eighty,