it often provoked the raillery of his fellow clerks, did not escape the
eyes of his employers. He was advanced step by step, and by the end
of the year was put in charge of the correspondence with banks and
agencies. He had saved some money, and had made one or two profitable
investments. He was enabled to take better apartments in the same
building he had occupied. He had few of the temptations of youth. His
fear of poverty and his natural taste kept him from the speculative and
material excesses of the period. A distrust of his romantic weakness
kept him from society and meaner entanglements which might have beset
his good looks and good nature. He worked in his rooms at night and
forbore his old evening rambles.
As the year wore on to the anniversary of his arrival, he thought much
of the dead man who had inspired his fortunes, and with it a sense of
his old doubts and suspicions revived. His reason had obliged him to
accept the loss of the fateful portmanteau as an ordinary theft; his
instinct remained unconvinced. There was no superstition connected
with his loss. His own prosperity had not been impaired by it. On the
contrary, he reflected bitterly that the dead man had apparently died
only to benefit others. At such times he recalled, with a pleasure that
he knew might become perilous, the tall English girl who had defended
Dornton's memory and echoed his own sympathy. But that was all over now.
One stormy night, not unlike that eventful one of his past experience,
Randolph sought his rooms in the teeth of a southwest gale. As he
buffeted his way along the rain-washed pavement of Montgomery Street, it
was not strange that his thoughts reverted to that night and the memory
of his dead protector. But reaching his apartment, he sternly banished
them with the vanished romance they revived, and lighting his lamp, laid
out his papers in the prospect of an evening of uninterrupted work.
He was surprised, however, after a little interval, by the sound of
uncertain and shuffling steps on the half-lighted passage outside, the
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