to escape from it. Ordinarily he would have gone to the
club room and had a game of chess with a member, or else he would have
gone down and idled away an hour or two before supper at the Art
Museum, where he was a visitor whenever he had plenty of time and the
business of the office was not pressing. Young Wellman had succeeded
to the clerical details of the shops, and Mr. Hardy's time was
generally free after four.

He had been oppressed with the thought of the other injured men. He
must go and see them. He could not rest till he had personally visited
them. He went out and easily ascertained where the men lived. Never
before did the contrast between the dull, uninteresting row of shop
tenements and his own elegant home rise up go sharply before him. In
fact, he had never given it much thought before. Now as he looked
forward to the end of the week, and knew that at its close he would be
no richer, no better able to enjoy luxuries than the dead man lying in
No. 760, he wondered vaguely but passionately how he could make use of
what he had heaped together to make the daily lives of some of these
poor men happier.

He found the man who had lost both eyes sitting up in bed and feeling
in a pathetic manner of a few blocks of wood which one of the children
in the room had brought to him. He was a big, powerful man like his
brother, the large-boned Dane, and it seemed a very pitiful thing that
he should be lying there like a baby when his muscles were as powerful
as ever. The brother was in the room with the injured man, and he said
to him:

"Olaf, Mr. Hardy come to see you."

"Hardy? Hardy?" queried the man in a peevish tone. "What do I know
him to be?"

"The manager. The one who donate so really much moneys to you."

"Ah?" with an indescribable accent. "He make me work on a Sunday. He
lose me my two eyes. A bad man, Svord! I will no have anything to do
with him."

And the old descendant of a thousand kings turned his face to the wall,
and would not even so much as make a motion towards his visitor. His
brother offered a rude apology. Mr. Hardy replied in a low tone:

"Say nothing about it. I deserve all your brother says. But for a
good reason I wish Olaf would say he forgives me."

Mr. Hardy came nearer the bed and spoke very earnestly and as if he had
known the man intimately:

"I did you a great wrong to order the work on Sunday, and in not doing
my duty concerning the inspection of th