f, with a look at the man which
the man remembered for many a long day afterwards.

"Will you come into the clerks' room?" asked Vendale. "They have a stove
there."

"No, no. No matter."

Vendale handed him the receipt. Obenreizer's interest in examining it
appeared to have been quenched as suddenly and as effectually as the fire
itself. He just glanced over the document, and said, "No; I don't
understand it! I am sorry to be of no use."

"I will write to Neuchatel by to-night's post," said Vendale, putting
away the receipt for the second time. "We must wait, and see what comes
of it."

"By to-night's post," repeated Obenreizer. "Let me see. You will get
the answer in eight or nine days' time. I shall be back before that. If
I can be of any service, as commercial traveller, perhaps you will let me
know between this and then. You will send me written instructions? My
best thanks. I shall be most anxious for your answer from Neuchatel. Who
knows? It may be a mistake, my dear friend, after all. Courage!
courage! courage!" He had entered the room with no appearance of being
pressed for time. He now snatched up his hat, and took his leave with
the air of a man who had not another moment to lose.

Left by himself, Vendale took a turn thoughtfully in the room.

His previous impression of Obenreizer was shaken by what he had heard and
seen at the interview which had just taken place. He was disposed, for
the first time, to doubt whether, in this case, he had not been a little
hasty and hard in his judgment on another man. Obenreizer's surprise and
regret, on hearing the news from Neuchatel, bore the plainest marks of
being honestly felt--not politely assumed for the occasion. With
troubles of his own to encounter, suffering, to all appearance, from the
first insidious attack of a serious illness, he had looked and spoken
like a man who really deplored the disaster that had fallen on his
friend. Hitherto Vendale had tried vainly to alter his first opinion of
Marguerite's guardian, for Marguerite's sake. All the generous instincts
in his nature now combined together and shook the evidence which had
seemed unanswerable up to this time. "Who knows?" he thought. "I may
have read that man's face wrongly, after all."

The time passed--the happy evenings with Marguerite came and went. It
was again the tenth morning since Vendale had written to the Swiss firm;
and again the answer appeared on his desk