How he kept his oath, and what it cost him in the beginning, nobody
knows. He certainly managed to compass the hardest thing that a man who
has drank heavily can do. He took his peg and wine at dinner, but he
never drank alone, and never let what he drank have the least hold on
him.

Once he told a bosom-friend the story of his great trouble, and how the
"influence of a pure honest woman, and an angel as well" had saved him.
When the man--startled at anything good being laid to Mrs. Reiver's
door--laughed, it cost him Moriarty's friendship. Moriarty, who is
married now to a woman ten thousand times better than Mrs. Reiver--a
woman who believes that there is no man on earth as good and clever as
her husband--will go down to his grave vowing and protesting that Mrs.
Reiver saved him from ruin in both worlds.

That she knew anything of Moriarty's weakness nobody believed for
a moment. That she would have cut him dead, thrown him over, and
acquainted all her friends with her discovery, if she had known of it,
nobody who knew her doubted for an instant.

Moriarty thought her something she never was, and in that belief saved
himself. Which was just as good as though she had been everything that
he had imagined.

But the question is, what claim will Mrs. Reiver have to the credit of
Moriarty's salvation, when her day of reckoning comes?

A BANK FRAUD.

He drank strong waters and his speech was coarse;
He purchased raiment and forebore to pay;
He struck a trusting junior with a horse,
And won Gymkhanas in a doubtful way.
Then, 'twixt a vice and folly, turned aside
To do good deeds and straight to cloak them, lied.

The Mess Room.

If Reggie Burke were in India now, he would resent this tale being told;
but as he is in Hong-Kong and won't see it, the telling is safe. He was
the man who worked the big fraud on the Sind and Sialkote Bank. He was
manager of an up-country Branch, and a sound practical man with a large
experience of native loan and insurance work. He could combine the
frivolities of ordinary life with his work, and yet do well. Reggie
Burke rode anything that would let him get up, danced as neatly as he
rode, and was wanted for every sort of amusement in the Station.

As he said himself, and as many men found out rather to their surprise,
there were two Burkes, both very much at your service. "Reggie Burke,"
betwe