often to show them what they're going to see that he won't say
anything at all!"

"He's a funny old fellow," Mrs. Palmer observed. "But he's so
shrewd I can't imagine his being deceived for such a long time.
Twenty years, you said?"

"Yes, longer than that, I understand. It appears when this
man--this Adams--was a young clerk, the old gentleman trusted him
with one of his business secrets, a glue process that Mr. Lamb
had spent some money to get hold of. The old chap thought this
Adams was going to have quite a future with the Lamb concern, and
of course never dreamed he was dishonest. Alfred says this Adams
hasn't been of any real use for years, and they should have let
him go as dead wood, but the old gentleman wouldn't hear of it,
and insisted on his being kept on the payroll; so they just
decided to look on it as a sort of pension. Well, one morning
last March the man had an attack of some sort down there, and Mr.
Lamb got his own car out and went home with him, himself, and
worried about him and went to see him no end, all the time he was
ill."

"He would," Mrs. Palmer said, approvingly. "He's a kind-hearted
creature, that old man."

Her husband laughed. "Alfred says he thinks his kind-heartedness
is about cured! It seems that as soon as the man got well again
he deliberately walked off with the old gentleman's glue secret.
Just calmly stole it! Alfred says he believes that if he had a
stroke in the office now, himself, his father wouldn't lift a