All the parties given by Mr. Grey at the Manor House were men's parties. Mrs. Grey rarely or never was to be found in the drawing-room after dinner; and, indeed, the drawing-room was seldom lighted up.

Mrs. Grey was a pretty, low-sized, dark-eyed, nervous woman, a few years the junior of her husband. He had met her first in London, in a house where she was staying on a visit with friends. She was alone in the world, had a small fortune, which, while it made her no object of pursuit in the circle she frequented, kept her independent.

There was a little mystery and a little doubt about her, and while neither the mystery nor the doubt was sufficient to disquiet anyone, it served to keep interest in her alive, and the more prudent and calculating of suitors from love-making. Individually she was popular; but while those who knew her spoke well of her in her absence, the good things said of her always began in superlatives, and, as the conversation went on, diminished to positives, and the talk usually ended with a vague "but" and an unfinished sentence.

Perhaps she was a little odd, they said. Perhaps she had French blood in her veins. Perhaps the strange blood was Spanish. She had a look not wholly English – a look denoting no close kinship with any other people. Her name was Muir, which seemed to indicate that she came of a stock north of the Tweed. Yet she had never been in Scotland, nor her father before her, nor anyone of his side, as far as he could trace back. Her mother had been the daughter of a Truro solicitor, her father a member of the Equity bar of London. Those who had known her father and mother declared that she resembled neither in her face nor her manner. She was dark, low-sized, and odd; they had both been tall, fair, and models of conventional insipidity.

When Henry Walter Grey married Miss Muir she was twenty-four years of age, he twenty-nine. The women judged her to be thirty-four, the men allowed that she might be twenty-seven; but all agreed that young Grey, with his prospects, might have done much better as far as money went.

But among the young and the chivalric of Daneford, young Grey helped forward his nascent popularity by marrying a poor wife and risking his father's displeasure for his sweetheart's sake. The young and chivalric of Daneford were never tired of pointing to the pleasantest and most prosperous man in the city as one who had made his love paramount above all other considerations in the selection of a wife.

From the time he won his wife until he lost her his manner towards her gained him daily increase of respect among the people of the city. Every indulgence and luxury which his position could afford were lavished upon her. Wives who had cause of displeasure or dissatisfaction with their husbands always cited Mr. Grey as a shining contrast to their own too economical or exacting lords. It was not alone that she was never denied anything for which she could reasonably care, but, notwithstanding the clubs and the institutions and the boards of which Mr. Grey was a member, no more domestic man lived in Daneford. He always dined at home, except on occasions of great public interest; and when he had no guests he sat reading or conversing with her, or they both went for a stroll in the fine twilight, or visited the theatre, or any other form of public amusement afforded by the town.

As the years of their married life glided by, and no child came to make an endearing interruption to the smooth course of wedded sweethearts, the attachment between the husband and wife seemed to borrow a greater depth from the soft melancholy arising out of their childless condition. It was, the town said, a thousand pities the rich, amiable, amusing, good-looking Wat Grey had no one to leave his fine business and his vast fortune to.

If a friend alluded to the fact of his childlessness he always put the subject aside with as little humour and as much gentleness as the character of the speaker allowed of. To his wife, who often made tearful allusions to the circumstance, he replied with cheerful hopefulness, and bade her set her grief for him away, as he was quite content and happy with the blessings Heaven had already sent him, chief among which was a wife he loved.

Although Mrs. Grey did not go into society, and had no ladies to dinner, she had a few visiting friends upon whom she called in turn, and who learned from her the uniform kindliness of her husband, and the great gentleness with which he accepted the absence of an heir or heiress.

In fact, the more people heard of Mr. Grey, the more he grew in popular esteem, and behind all this amiability on his part there was a factor which hugely multiplied its value. At first, when he brought his wife home to Daneford, and the people of his set began to know her a little, they all declared that she was pretty, very pretty, and a trifle odd.

Time went on, and although she lost none of her prettiness with her years – hers being the beauty that depends on bone and outline, and not on surface and colour – her peculiarities gained upon her; and whether, the Daneford folk said, it was the foreign blood that darkened her eyes and her hair and her ways, or a slight strain of madness, they could not decide, but she was, beyond all doubt, not in manner like the average English-woman of her class.

At first her peculiarities defied definition. People said she was very nice, but a little queer, cracked, crazy. She was very impulsive, and sometimes incoherent. No action of hers seemed the result of forethought or preparation. She ordered the servants to bring this, that, or the other thing, and when they came with it she told them they might take it away again, as she had changed her mind. She ordered the brougham for four, went out walking at a quarter to four, and stayed out till six, without countermanding the brougham.

About the time that Mr. Grey bought the Manor House, Mrs. Grey had a difference with her cook, and her cook left her in a violent temper. The cook had been with her ever since Mrs. Grey had first come to Daneford, and was the confidential servant of her mistress. Soon after the cook had left it reached the ears of a few acquaintances of Mr. Grey that a dreadful spectre had appeared in his household. The fact that Mrs. Grey had now been married some years and was still childless had preyed very deeply on her excitable temperament, and, dreadful to say, she not unfrequently took more wine than was good for her.

Those who heard this now saw a reason, unguessed by others, why the banker bought that odious house swathed round with that fearful wood. There his wife would be secluded, free from prying eyes and guarded against any close daily contact with neighbours. How had it been kept secret so long? The cook, now discharged, had obtained for the unhappy woman what she wanted, and the poor lady was wonderfully discreet and cautious, and until that servant went no one but the cook and the afflicted husband ever dreamed of such a thing. It was dreadful.

But the most intimate friend of Grey never knew from him, by even the faintest hint, there was a single cloud over his domestic happiness.

He always spoke of his wife in terms of the most tender consideration and kindliness. He was by no means weak or uxorious; but there was a loyal trust, an ever-active sympathy in him towards her, that won greatly on the young and old men and women of Daneford.

The evil circumstance under which Mrs. Grey laboured was never an open scandal in the town. In the first place, owing to her own great prudence and circumspection, no one had any suspicion of the melancholy fact from herself. If she was the victim of a debasing weakness, she never betrayed herself publicly, and those who heard of it through indirect ways had kept the secret closely, out of respect to the man whose fame and name and popularity stood so high among his fellow-citizens. Indeed, some who heard the rumour disbelieved it wholly, and declared their conviction that it was the malicious invention of a discharged servant, based on the eccentric habits and unfamiliar ways of the poor lady.

But the fact remained that, even to the spacious Manor House, no lady guests were invited to dinner; no lady guests stayed for twenty-four hours; and, beyond a few afternoon callers, no ladies visited the house at all. But perhaps in Daneford there were not a dozen families in possession of the fact that would account for the strict retirement in which the mistress of the Manor lived, and the young and the chivalric continued to look on Grey and his wife as not only the most prosperous, but also the most happy, couple in the whole county.

Very soon after Henry Grey's marriage with Miss Muir, he found out that she did not possess the solid good sense and grave discernment essential in the confidant of a banker.

She not only lacked the golden faculty of silence, but dealt with facts communicated to her in a most imaginative and injudicious manner. He told her that a substantial and solvent merchant of the town had overdrawn his account five hundred pounds. Shortly after, the merchant's wife called on Mrs. Grey, and the latter, in a moment of communicativeness, said to the former that business was in a bad way, and that she understood the former's husband owed the Bank, over and above ordinary business, no less a sum than five thousand pounds. The merchant's wife related this to her husband, and he came in great indignation to Grey. Mr. Grey said his wife's talk had been only woman's gossip, and that he had most certainly never told his wife or any one else the merchant owed the Bank five thousand pounds over-draught.

The merchant said he was quite sure Mr. Grey had not, but urged that something of the over-draught must have been communicated to Mrs. Grey, and that a woman's gossip was quite capable of ruining a solvent man.

On another occasion the banker told her the Bank had not made as much money that year as the year before, and she informed some chance callers that the Bank was losing heavily. This rumour might have shaken the credit of an institution less solidly established than the Daneford Bank; but in the city and country surrounding the city the Bank was looked upon as much more safe than the Bank of England, insomuch as the Threadneedle Street concern had a paper currency, and the Daneford did not mortgage any of its capital by such an issue, and stood in no temptation to diminish its stock of gold or overstep safety.

These two experiences of Grey's, coupled with a few others of less importance but similar nature, convinced him that the more general and abstract his statements of business matters to his wife the better, and from the moment he arrived at this conclusion he carried it into effect. She, having no talent for the particular, did not seem to miss his confidence, and remained perfectly content with commonplace generalities as to business matters. Indeed, having very little of the highly feminine virtue of inquisitiveness, she was not much interested in business statements of any kind.

Most men will talk more freely to a woman whom they trust than to any man, no matter how near to them by ties of nature or affection. Henry Grey was no exception to the rule, and when he found he durst no longer confide important secrets to his wife, he unburdened himself to another woman, a widow, now past seventy, but still straight and intelligent, and sympathetic and hale, a woman who had won and retained a most powerful hold upon his esteem, affection, and confidence – his mother.

Whilst all the world of Daneford was calculating the enormous fortune the Daneford Bank must be making for its owner, and was bemoaning the fact that Wat Grey had no child to leave his fine business and his vast savings to, there were two people the nature of whose anxiety about Mr. Grey's affairs did not take the same course.

These two people were the only beings possessing knowledge of the condition of Mr. Grey's private fortune and the bank.

For years he had kept the true state of affairs from his mother, but at length, as blow succeeded blow, he could no longer bear the burden of his secret, and he unfolded it to her. He did not trouble her with detail, but informed her briefly that he had backed the South in the American wars – that not only had he lost all his own private fortune, but of the depositors' money as well.

At first she was overwhelmed with surprise and horror to think the splendid business and reputation made for the Bank by her dead husband and his father before him should be ruined by her son, and that not only had the Bank been ruined and her son's fortune and position destroyed, but the moneys of the clients had also been included in the horrible disaster.

But, despite her seventy years, she was a brave old lady, full of honour and spirits and courage. Once the first shock was over, she set all her faculties at work to try and sustain the drooping energies of her only son.

She know he was not free from troubles at home; she knew he gave none of his business confidences to his wife. Though she deplored these facts, she felt there was no help for them; and if at first reluctant to assist him in councils which ought to be held between him and his wife, in the end she saw it would be the wisest course for her to listen, to encourage him to speak, and to aid him with any advice she might think it wise to give.

Apparently, however, the affairs of the Bank were beyond the aid of advice. At every interview between mother and son he assured her he saw no opening in the clouds; that, in fact, they got blacker and blacker as time wore on.

Towards the beginning of 1866 things had, the son told the mother, come to the worst.

"All is lost," he said; "all is lost. I have been staving off and staving off until everything has got into a hopeless tangle, out of which I can find but one thing – ruin!"

"Then, Henry, I suppose you must shut the door; and as you see nothing else for it, the sooner you stop up the better."

"Mother, the day I shut the Bank door I'll open another door."

"What do you mean?"

"I'll open the door into the other world with a charge of gunpowder."

"Don't say such a foolish, dreadful thing! You are not, I hope, such a coward as to fly from the consequences of your own act. If you have lost the money in fair trading you need not be ashamed to meet them all; others beside you lost by that unfortunate South. Your father would have stood his ground and faced the city," said the old woman, with spirit and pride.

"No doubt, mother, no doubt my father would have had the manliness to stand and face the break; but he was a man of great endurance and nerve; you know I am not. I would do anything rather than meet such a crash and live after it. You know I have been much more out in the world than my father. I am mixed up with such a number of things, am closely connected with such a number of institutions and men, that nothing, no consideration, could induce me to outlive bankruptcy. The people would not believe facts; they would not credit any statement, however plain, that I was insolvent. They would say that I had appropriated the money of the depositors, made a fraudulent pretence of bankruptcy, and concealed the money for my own use. I know the world better than you, mother; I know the world, and what it would say. I may be popular now; but if I fell, the street-boys might kick me through the gutter and no one would take my part, or try to get me fair play."

He dropped his head into his hands and shuddered.

The old woman looked at him with a sad sympathy, which was not wholly destitute of reproach.

"You know, Henry, thousands of men have had to face such things, and have come out of their difficulties without a stain or a hard word – "

"In my case that is impossible. I tell you, mother, they would have no more mercy on me than on a snake. The Bank is a private one, the property of one person, and on that one person all the wrath would fall. It is not like a joint stock, or a limited liability, where many are concerned as principals or shareholders or directors. It would be a case between an individual and his creditors. It would look as if I had borrowed money privately of all the people I knew, and spent it or gambled in dangerous foreign speculations, until I had dissipated their last pennies and left the people beggars. No, mother; the day I shut the Bank door I open the gate of Eternity with a bullet."

He was walking up and down his mother's drawing-room, with his hands clasped behind his coat, his eyes bent on the ground, and a look of concentrated thought upon his usually placid and beaming features.

"I will not hear you say that again, Henry," cried the mother, stamping her foot impatiently on the floor. "Listen to me. You know my two thousand a year is clear of the Bank – "

"Thank Heaven and my father for that!" cried Grey earnestly.

"Can't you shut up the Bank, and you and Bee" – Beatrice, his wife – "come and stay with me for a while? We could leave England and live on a thousand a year in the south of France, or anywhere you like, and save up a thousand a year to start you again – "

"I would die ten thousand deaths, dear mother, rather than touch your money," he cried fervently, catching her hand and holding it in both his, and opening his hands now and then to kiss the shrivelled hand which had once, when soft and full, joined his – then softer and fuller – in prayer, and now, when he was strong and she was weak, tried to shield and succour him as in the days when he was a little child.

"Don't be sentimental at such a crisis," cried his mother petulantly. "You shall do as I say; or if you like, when the Bank affair is settled, we can sell the annuity. I know I'm old, and it's not worth many years' purchase; but we should get a few thousand for it, and that would give you a fresh start in some other business. Now I tell you this is what shall happen. Do you hear me? I will not wait for your consent; this very day I will see about selling the annuity – what do you call it? capitalising it? Go, Henry, and no more nonsense about gunpowder and bullets. Such things are only fit for the stage or the Continent, and are quite beneath the notice of a sensible English man of business."

He rose to his feet and cried: "You shall not, you must not, mother. I have been making out things worse than they really are. I am depressed and ill. Believe me, there is no need for doing what you say. There is one venture of mine, in no way connected with the late war, the greatest of all my ventures; and although I do not look on it as a very safe or sound venture, it may come all right yet. I shall know in a fortnight. You must promise me to do nothing until then. Promise me, my dear mother!"

He spoke eagerly, passionately; and as he uttered the final words he caught both her hands in his, and looked beseechingly into her eyes.

"And in a fortnight you will tell me?" she asked, looking searchingly into his face.

"In a fortnight I will tell you."

"And between this and then you will not, in my presence or in your own secret mind, speak or think about such nonsense as daggers or poison-bowls, or gunpowder or bullets?" she asked scornfully.

"I promise I will not."

"Very well," she said; "I will do nothing till I hear from you at the end of a fortnight. Let us shake hands, Henry, and part friends."

"Friends!" he exclaimed, as tears of love and sorrow came into his eyes. "Mother, you are the only one on earth I love now."

"Hush, sir! How dare you say such a thing!"

"I swear it!" he cried vehemently. "I would do anything, dare anything, for you, mother – "

"And for your wife," she added, as if reminding him of an omission made in carelessness.

He paid no attention to her suggestion.

"You are the only one in the world who knows me really."

"And longest," she added, with a bright smile. "There – go now, Henry; this scene is growing theatrical or Continental, and unbecoming the drawing-room of an English mother. There – go."

And she hustled him to the door, opened the door, thrust him out, and closed the door upon him.

As soon as she was sure he had left the vicinity of the door she threw herself down on a couch and burst into tears, exclaiming softly to herself between the sobs:

"My Wat! my poor Wat! my darling child, is it come to this with you?"

Then after a while she dried her eyes and sat up. "Perhaps all may go well with him after all. Perhaps this venture of his may come right. It was lucky I got him out of the room so soon. Another moment and I should have broken down, and been more dramatic and Continental than he, and that would never do. No son respects or relies on a mother who weeps on his bosom, and causes him to remember she is not his earliest and strongest friend."

In the strong-room of the Daneford Bank all the money and securities held by the bank were kept. The last duty of Mr. Aldridge, manager of the Daneford Bank, each day, was to return the cash, bills, books, &c., to this strong-room. To this strong-room there were three keys in the possession of the staff of the bank, one held by the manager, one by the accountant, and one by the teller.

The door could not be opened save by the aid of the three keys. Thus no officer of the Bank could commit a larceny in the strong-room without the countenance of two others.

Mr. Grey had duplicates of the keys held by the accountant and teller. But the key held by the manager was unique, and even Mr. Grey himself could not enter the strong-room without the manager's key.

In this strong-room were kept not only the valuables of the bank, but cases and chests containing all kinds of highly portable and extremely precious substances and papers belonging to customers of the Bank. Here were iron plate-chests, iron deed-boxes, jewel-caskets in great numbers, left for safe keeping, not being part of the Bank's property, and against which there was no charge by the Bank but an almost nominal one for storage.

The evening after Mr. Grey had that interview with his mother, he called at the Bank, found the manager in, and having told Mr. Aldridge that a secret report had reached him to the disadvantage of a customer whose name he was not allowed to disclose, he wished to borrow the manager's key for half an hour, as he wanted to turn over the suspected man's account.

He got the key and a candle, and went down to the strong-room. In half an hour he returned, and handing back the key to Mr. Aldridge, said: "I am glad to say that the account I spoke of is quite satisfactory, and that it will not be necessary to make any alteration in our dealings with the customer I alluded to."

The next day Mr. Grey went to London, and returned the evening after. A few days later, among the letters was an advice from Mr. Grey's London correspondents to the effect that Messrs. Barrington, Ware, & Duncan had lodged twenty thousand pounds with them to Mr. Grey's credit.

That day Mr. Grey called upon his mother, and told her some of the expected good luck had come – not all, but still twenty thousand out of the fire.

"I told you, Henry, you had only to wait and face it, and you would win. If you did any of those romantic and foolish things with daggers and poison-bowls, they would say you were little better than a thief."

"Now they could not even say as much," he said softly to himself.

"What are you dreaming about now!" his mother cried, in exasperation.

He looked up with one of his best and brightest smiles, and said: "Dreams, madam! nay, it is. I know not dreams;" and kissing his mother to punctuate his parody, he smiled again, and added: "I was only joking, just to enjoy the sight of your anger now that things are looking better. Good-bye."

And so he left her.