heavy deposit. It was just before closing time and the clerks
were all intent on getting their books straight, preparatory to
leaving. How well he remembered that moment of restless turning of
ledgers and the slight accession of eagerness in the younger clerks,
as they followed the long columns of figures down with the forefinger
of the left hand--the pen poised in the right. The whole scene smote
him poignantly as he stood at the teller's window waiting. And he
might have been doing that, he thought! A whole lifetime spent in
doing just that and more like it, year in and year out!

How had his life been better? He had sinned--and failed. Ah! But he
had lived and loved--lived terribly and loved greatly. God help him,
how he loved! Even for life to end here--either in prison or in
death--still he had felt the tremendous passions, and understood the
meaning of their power in a human soul. This had life brought him, and
a love beyond measure to crown all.

The teller peered at him through the little window behind which he had
stood so many years peering at people in this sleepy little bank, this
sure, safe, little bank, always doing its conservative business in the
same way, and heretofore always making good. He reached out a long,
well-shaped hand,--a large-veined hand, slightly hairy at the wrist,
to take the bank notes. How often had Harry King seen that hand
stretched thus through the little window, drawing bank notes toward
him! Almost with a shock he saw it now reach for his own--for the
first time. In the old days he had had none to deposit. It was always
for others it had been extended. Now it seemed as if he must seize the
hand and shake it,--the only hand that had been reached out to him
yet, in this town where his boyhood had been spent.

A young man who had preceded Harry King at the teller's window paused
near by at the cashier's desk and began asking questions which Harry
himself would have been glad to ask, but could not.

He was an alert, bright-eyed young chap with a smiling face. "Good
afternoon, Mr. Copeland. Any news for me to-day?"

Mr. Copeland was an elderly man of great dignity, and almost as much
of a figure there as the Elder himself. It was an act of great
temerity to approach him for items of news for the _Leauvite Mercury_.
Of this fact the young reporter seemed to be blithely ignorant. All
the clerks were covertly watching the outcome, and thus attention was
turned from Harry King; even