"Locked! who locked it?" asked Mr. Forde angrily.

"Mr. Werner, when he left yesterday," was the reply.

Ten minutes passed, quarter of an hour struck, then the manager said,

"It does not seem of much use my waiting here. Tell Mr. Werner to come round to me the instant he arrives--the instant, remember. What are you looking at each other for in that manner?" he continued, shouting at them passionately. "Do you mean to do what I tell you or not?"

All the clerks but one drew back a little abashed; they had silently countenanced the perpetration of a grim practical joke, which, while the clock went on ticking, seemed to grow flat and stale and unprofitable to each of them save Carless.

He it was who now answered.

"Perhaps you are not aware that our governor is dead."

"You had better take care, sir," said Mr. Forde. "I do not know whether Mr. Werner has granted you a licence for impertinence, but if he has--by--he shall rue it and you too."

"It is true though," interposed a man sitting in a dark part of the office, who had not hitherto spoken, but remained, his head supported by his hands, reading 'The Times.'

"What is true," demanded the manager.

"That Mr. Werner is dead. I had occasion to go to his house this morning and found that he died last night."

"It is a lie; it is a ---- put off. He is gone like that villain Kleinwort; but he need not think to escape me. I will find him if he is above ground!"

"You won't have far to go then," was the reply. "He is lying stiff and safe enough in his own study."

"And he is gone to a land with which we have no extradition treaty,"

observed Carless, as Mr. Forde banged the door behind him.

"Hold your tongue, do," entreated the 'Times" student, who, having been in a fashion confidential clerk to Mr. Werner, had some comprehension how the matter stood. "Our governor has been badgered into his grave, and I only hope they will call me on the inquest that I may be able to state my belief."

"And he was not half a bad sort, the governor," said Carless, shutting up the day-book.

"I say let's all go to the funeral," suggested a third; and so these young men wrote their employer's epitaph.

Meantime Mr. Forde was proceeding westward as fast as the legs of a swift horse could take him. To describe what he felt would be as impossible as to detail the contents and occupants of each vehicle the hansom passed--the hopes and fears--the miseries and joys hidden behind the walls of the countless houses, which lay to left and right of his route.

He believed; he did not believe. He dreaded; no it was all a sham. Now in imagination he started himself with the detectives in pursuit, again with dry parched lips he was answering the questions of his directors.

If he had realized the fact, he suffered in the course of that rapid drive enough misery to have driven many a man insane. Misery of his own causing if you will, but misery all the harder to endure on that account.

Happily for himself, however, Mr. Forde was a person who did not realize. He was a man who before he had grasped the worst decided there must be some means of escape from it, and accordingly, the first words he uttered to Williams were--

"Now, then, what's all this?"

"Have not you heard, sir," answered that well-trained functionary, startled for once out of his propriety of demeanour by Mr. Forde's tremendous knock, by Mr. Forde's loud utterance, "my master died last night!"

"Died! Nonsense; went away you mean."

"Passed away, sir, if you prefer that expression," acquiesced the man.

"He had been out all day, and when he returned in the evening he said it was of no use serving dinner, for he was suffering such agonies from neuralgia that he could not eat anything. He had called at the doctor's on his way, but he was not at home.

"He asked me to bring him a cup of strong coffee, which I did.

"About eight o'clock I went in to the study to light the gas, and when I opened the door there was a strong smell of some apothecary's stuff,"

(here the man became visibly affected), "and something in that and the way my master was lying on the sofa attracted my attention. I spoke to him, but he did not answer me. I lifted his arm which was hanging over on the carpet, but it fell again when I let it go.

"Then I ran out of the house for a doctor. I had seen a doctor's carriage standing at the next door. He came in and looked at him. I asked what could be done, and he said 'Nothing, the poor gentleman is dead.'"

"Where is he?" asked Mr. Forde, who had listened impatiently to this statement.

"In the study, sir."

Mr. Forde crossed the hall and turned the handle of the door, but the door was locked.

"Have you the key?" he asked. "Yes, sir," answered Williams, fumbling in his pocket nervously--the fact being that, notwithstanding his large experience of the world and knowledge of society, he had never before come in contact with any one who did not consider it necessary at all events, to assume a certain sympathy with misfortune, and it is no exaggeration to say Mr. Forde's utter callousness frightened the man.

He had never previously seen a human being whose intense thought for self swallowed up every thought for other people; to whom the death or ruin of any number of his fellow-creatures was simply a bagatelle when compared with any misfortune which could touch himself.

"If you cannot unlock the door, let me do it," remarked Mr. Forde, taking the key out of Williams' fingers, and shooting back the bolt with a quick sharp click; with a steady determined step he crossed the room.

"Raise that blind," he said.

Williams hesitated, but then obeyed, and at the same moment Mr. Forde drew aside, with no faltering or gentle touch, the handkerchief which covered the dead man's face.

There he lay, as he had died. There was no sneer curling the lip now, no scowl disfiguring the forehead. There was no expression of despair, no look of anguish. Death was fast smoothing the hard lines out of that dark face; and as Mr. Forde realized all this--realized there was no deception about the matter--that no insult could reach his sense, no dread affect him more, he could have cursed the man who long and long before had told him if ever misfortune came upon him he should know how to meet it. This was how he had met it; this was what he had in his mind then. Mr. Forde understood perfectly that when once he found the battle going against him, when once he found the tide setting too strongly for him to resist its flow, he had always meant to end the difficulty thus.

"Yes, he is dead sure enough," commented Mr. Forde at length. "He has taken precious good care to leave other people in the lurch as any one who ever knew Henry Werner might safely have sworn he would do."

"I do not quite understand, sir," said the butler deprecatingly.

"Oh! you don't, my friend. Well, perhaps not; perhaps you think your master really had neuralgia, and really took that stuff to cure it."

"Certainly, sir."

"Oh! you do, do you? Well, then, I can tell you, the coward took it because he was afraid to meet his creditors, because he was afraid to meet me, because he knew he was a beggar, and that if he did not do something of this sort, his fine feathers would be stripped off, and he and his turned out into the world without a shilling, as better people have been before now.

"I must see his wife before I leave," he added abruptly.

"See Mrs. Werner, sir? Impossible."

"Impossible! Why is it impossible? Who is she that she should not be seen; who is she that she should not hear what I have to say? She has had all the smooth, she must now take her share of the rough."

"My mistress, sir, is very ill," remarked Williams, who really was in a state of mind baffling description.

He believed Mr. Forde was mad, but he could not determine how to get him out of the house.

"Ill," repeated Mr. Forde; "and so am I very ill, yet I have to be about. I shall have to face my directors to-morrow over that villain's affairs. Sick or well I shall have to be in the City. Don't talk to me about illness. I must and I will see Mrs. Werner, and you may go and tell her so."

"If you will please to walk into the dining-room, sir, I will deliver your message," said the butler. He really was afraid of leaving Mr.