and it was time she recognized it.

With the recall of these incidents in his checkered career a new thought
blazed up in his mind--rather a blinding thought. As its rays brightened
he halted in his course, and stood gazing across the street as if
uncertain as to his next move. Perhaps, after all, it would be best NOT
to pawn the mantilla. An outright sale would be much better. If this
were impossible, it would be just as well to destroy the ticket and
postpone his scheme for regaining possession of her person. While
something certainly was due him--and she of all women in the world
should supply it--forcing her to carry out the landlord's plan, now that
he thought it over, might result in a certain kind of publicity,
which, if his own antecedents were looked into, would be particularly
embarrassing. She might--and here a slight shiver passed through
him--she might, in her obstinacy, threaten him with the forged
certificates, a result hardly possible, for no letters of any kind had
reached her, none so far as he knew; neither had he ever discussed the
incident with her, for the simple reason that women, as a rule, never
understood such things. And yet how could he, as a financier, have tided
over an accounting which, if allowed to go on, would have wiped out the
savings of hundreds who had trusted him and whom he could not desert in
their hour of need, except by some such desperate means? Of course,
if he had to do it all over again, he would never have locked up the
stock-book in his own safe. That was a mistake. He ought to have left it
with the treasurer. Then he could have shifted the responsibility.

Just here, oddly enough, he began to think of Felix--that cold-blooded,
unimaginative man, who knew absolutely nothing about how to treat a
woman, and, for that matter, knew nothing about anything else in so far
as the practical side of life was concerned. The fool--here his brow
knit--had not only broken up the final deal, in which everything had
been fixed with Mullhallsen, the German banker, for an additional loan,
but he had unearthed and compared certain certificates, in his fight to
protect an obstinate old father. Worse still, he had taken himself
off to Australia to starve, instead of saving what he could out of the
wreck. Had he only listened to advice, the whole catastrophe might have
been averted.

And this fool would have ruined his wife as well, had not
he--Dalton--stepped in and saved her from burying h