He thought the matter over, and the more he thought the more unwilling
he was to give up this sum, which all at once had become dearer to him
than all the rest of his possessions.

"I'll wait to see whether the note is found," he said to himself. "Of
course, if it is, I will pay it--" That is, he would pay it if he
were obliged to do it.

Poor Barclay was buried in Chicago--it would have been too expensive
to bring on the body--and pretty soon it transpired that he had left
no property, except the modest cottage in which his widow and son
continued to live.

Poor Mrs. Barclay! Everybody pitied her, and lamented her straitened
circumstances. Squire Davenport kept silence, and thought, with
guilty joy, "They haven't found the note; I can keep the money, and no
one will be the wiser!"

How a rich man could have been guilty of such consummate meaness I
will not undertake to explain, but "the love of money is the root of
evil," and Squire Davenport had love of money in no common measure.

Five years passed. Mrs. Barclay was obliged to mortgage her house to
obtain the means of living, and the very man who supplied her with the
money was the very man whom her husband had blindly trusted. She
little dreamed that it was her own money he was doling out to her.

In fact, Squire Davenport himself had almost forgotten it. He had
come to consider the thousand dollars and interest fully and
absolutely his own, and had no apprehension that his mean fraud would