very accounts over which the two were poring.  And his patron had showed the same impatience when it came to placing the money in the bank.  Although his own lips were sealed professionally by reason of the interests of another client, he had begged St. George, almost to the verge of interference, not to give it to the Patapsco, until he had been silenced with:  “Have them put it to my credit, sir.  I have known every member of that bank for years.”

All these things were, of course, unknown to Harry, the ultimate beneficiary.  Who had filled the bucket, and how and why, were unimportant facts to him.  That it was full, and ready for his use, brought with it the same sense of pleasure he would have felt on a hot day at Moorlands when he had gone to the old well, drawn up the ice-cold water, and, plunging in the sweet-smelling gourd, had drank to his heart’s content.

This was what wells were made for; and so were fathers, and big, generous men like his Uncle George, who had dozens of friends ready to cram money into his pocket for him to hand over to whoever wanted it and without a moment’s hesitation—­just as Slater had handed him the money he needed when Gilbert wanted it in a hurry.

Nor could it be expected that Harry, even with the examination of St. George’s accounts with the Patapsco and other institutions going on under his very eyes, understood fully just what a bank failure really meant.  Half a dozen banks, he remembered, had gone to smash some few years before, sending his father to town one morning at daylight, where he stayed for a week, but no change, so far as he could recall, had happened because of it at Moorlands.  Indeed, his father had bought a new coach for his mother the very next week, out of what he had “saved from the wreck,” so he had told her.

It was not until the hurried overhauling of a mass of papers beneath his uncle’s hand, and the subsequent finding of a certain stray sheet by Pawson, that the boy was aroused to a sense of the gravity of the situation.  And even then his interest did not become acute until, the missing document identified, St. George had turned to Pawson and, pointing to an item halfway down the column, had said in a lowered tone, as if fearing to be overheard: 

“You have the receipts, have you not, for everything on this list?—­Slater’s account too, and Hampson’s?”

“They are in the file beside you, sir.”

“Well, that’s a comfort, anyhow.”

“And the balance”—­here he examined a small book which lay open beside him—­“amounting to”—­he paused—­“is of course locked up in their vaults?”

Harry had craned his head in instant attention.  His quickened ears had caught two familiar names.  It was Slater who had loaned him the five hundred dollars which he gave to Gilbert, which his father had commended him for borrowing; and it was Hampson who had sold him the wretched horse that had stumbled and broken his leg and had afterwards to be shot.