CHAPTER I

The position of confidential family adviser is not without its
drawbacks, and it was with a certain reluctance that I told the office
boy to show Mrs. Magnus in. For Mrs. Magnus was that _bete noire_
of the lawyer--a woman recently widowed, utterly without business
experience, and yet with a firm belief in her ability to manage her
husband's estate. If Mrs. Magnus chose to ruin herself there was, of
course, no reason why I should worry, but it is annoying to have a
person constantly asking for advice and as constantly disregarding it.
I never really understood why Mrs. Magnus asked for advice at all.

She was a woman of about fifty, thin and nervous, with a curious habit
of compressing her lips into a tight knot, under the impression, I
suppose, that the result indicated strength of character. Peter
Magnus had married her when he was only an obscure clerk in the great
commission house which he was afterward to own, and she was a school
teacher or governess, or something of that sort. Perhaps she was a
little ahead of him intellectually at the start, but he had broadened
and developed, while she had narrowed and dried up, but she never lost
the illusion of her mental supremacy, nor the idea that she had, in
some dim way, married beneath her.

There were no children, and for the past ten years the old Magnus
house on Twenty-third Street had been for her a kind of hermitage from
which she seldom issued. Great business blocks sprang up on either
side of it, but she would never permit her husband to sell it and move
farther uptown.

For Magnus, on the other hand, the house became in time merely a sort
of way station between the busy terminals of his life. I dare say he
grew indifferent to his wife. That however, has nothing to do with
this story.

Mrs. Magnus usually entered my office as one intrenched in conscious
strength, but this morning it was evident that something had occurred
to disturb her calm assurance. Her lips seemed more shrunken than
ever; there were little lines of worry about her eyes, and dark
circles under them, and as she dropped into the chair I placed for
her, I saw that her hands were trembling. As I sat down in my own
chair and swung around to face her, the conviction struck through me
that she was badly frightened.

"Mr. Lester," she began, after a moment in which she was visibly
struggling for self-control, "I want fifty thousand dollars in
currency."

"Why--why, of c