“She said it was quite correct. You see we were a little uncertain,—we have to be very cautious in banking matters—sorry to have caused any delay, I’m sure! Now let me see,—three hundred—two fifties—four hundred—fifty—twenty-five—another twenty-five. Kindly look through the notes before leaving the counter.”
Boy did as he was told with shaking fingers.
Then he folded them all together and put them in his pocket, and looked at the cashier very strangely indeed.
“Good morning!” he said.
“Good morning.”
Boy walked to the heavy spring door and pulled it open—then passed through and was gone, the cashier watching him till he had disappeared.
“Curious—very curious!” he soliloquized. “That young chap looked as if he had got poison instead of bank notes. I wonder what’s up?”
Often did that wonder affect the worthy cashier. The people who came and went in the bank, with money, and without it, were strange enough in their various expressions of countenance and mannerisms to provide many a student with subject-matter for thought,—still, it was not often that so young a lad as Boy was seen there with such a whole history of despair and shame written on his face. And that despair and shame had not lightened with his possession of the much-needed and sorely coveted money,—it had, on the contrary, deepened and become far heavier to bear. But he had now made up his mind as to his immediate course of action. He had resolved upon it in the very moment that the cashier had handed him the bank notes, and he was only anxious to go through with his intention while it was fresh and newly formed in his mind, lest anything should make him hesitate or falter. He went back straight to his lodgings and there putting all the bank notes into one large envelope wrote the following letter:—
“Dear generous Miss Letty!
I don’t know what to say to you for your kindness and your mercy to me, which is so much more than I deserve!—but I know what I ought to do and I am doing it as well as I can. I send you back here all the money I tried to get by the wicked fraud of adding another figure to the one in your cheque—and I hope you will try and forgive me for my attempted and intended theft. I don’t understand how it is you can be so good to me as to shield me in this way, but your great mercy has made me bitterly ashamed of myself, and I do beg your pardon with all my heart. I will try to make amends somehow, so that you shall not hear any bad of me again. God bless you always, dear Miss Letty, for your unexpected and most heavenly kindness to your wretched