IN THE 'TIMES.'
If there was trouble at Homewood on that especial Wednesday, it had not been a day of unmixed pleasure to two people in the city.
His worst enemy might have pitied Mr. Forde when on opening the 'Times,' lying over the back of the official chair at St. Vedast Wharf, the first sentence which met his eye was,
"Before Mr. Commissioner Blank." "Re Archibald Mortomley," and all the rest of it.
The paragraph was not altogether an inch long, but it proved enough to make Mr. Forde turn as faint and sick as many a man brave enough and honest enough had turned before in that very office.
In imagination he saw looming in the distance ruin and beggary. He heard the gates of St. Vedast Wharf close behind him for the last time. Things were worse with him, much worse than they had been when Mortomley's nephew came to say his uncle meant to go into liquidation, and Mr. Forde felt impelled once again to take his hat.
"I wish I had left then," he muttered.
If a house be tottering, the removal of even a single stone may hasten the impending catastrophe. As Mr. Forde believed, Mortomley was a most important stone in the edifice of his own safety, and yet even at that juncture it never occurred to him it was his own mad sledge-hammer blows had driven it so completely out of place that no one could ever hope to make it available at St. Vedast Wharf again.
Really the manager was to be pitied. If there chanced to be one thing more than another on which he piqued himself, it was his genius for diplomacy, and, as Mr. Gibbons said, he had done a neat thing when he employed his own solicitor to do Mortomley's work.