"But I insist...."
"Mr. Wadsworth, everything will be fully explained to you the moment you enter my house; More I shall not tell you. You are at liberty to return home."
"It concerns the bank?" The voice had something human in it now; a note of affection.
Arthur Wadsworth loved the bank as a man loves his sweetheart, but more explicitly, as a miser loves the hoard hidden in the stocking. He loved every corner of the building. He worshiped the glass-covered marbles over which the gold passed and repassed. He adored the sight of the bent backs of the bookkeepers, the individual-account clerks, the little cages of the paying and receiving tellers, always so beautifully littered with little slips of paper, packets of bills, stacks of gold and silver; he loved the huge steel-vault, stored with bags of gold and bundles of notes, bonds, and stocks. Money was his god. Summed up, he was a miser in all that contemptible word implies: stingy, frugal, cautious, suspicious, sly, cruel, and relentless; he was in the concrete what his father had been in the abstract.
"It concerns the bank?" he repeated, torn by doubt.
George shrugged. "Let us be going."
"Will it be necessary to call in the police?"
"No."
"I suppose, then," said Wadsworth bitterly, wondering, too, over the strange animosity of this young man he did not know—"I suppose I must do just as you say?"