A Canadian Bankclerk Part 10

While the teller looked Evan's difference loomed up as big as a mountain. The tired savings clerk had stumbled over it many times.

"By Jove!" he shouted, "give us another cigarette!"

A moment later he was sorry he had asked for it, but he was obliged to smoke it. It brought him such pleasant sensations he decided it would be a good medicine to take in crises of hard work.

Immediately after Nelson's difference was found, the boys planned a dance. They had been treated well by the girls of Mt. Alban, and it was up to them to reciprocate.

"Don't you think so?" asked the semi-drunk.

"Sure," said Evan, choking on an inhale.

"Who'll start the fund?" asked Bill.

"I will," responded Nelson, producing a five-dollar bill--all he had.

"That's the kind of a sport," said the foreign teller. "Gee! I haven't seen a real five outside my cage for a month."

"I wish I was on the cash like you, Jack," grinned Watson.

"What would you do?"

"Why, borrow a little occasionally. You didn't get me wrong, I hope?"

"No chance, Bill; we know you're honest."

The dance given by the bankboys of Mt. Alban was a success--in all but a financial way. The thing did not pay for itself, and there was an extra draft on each banker for two dollars. Even wrote home for a loan of five dollars. He also hinted that he needed a new suit, that he felt shabby at parties beside the private banker's son and the haberdasher's nephew. A cheque came signed "George Nelson"; it was twenty-five dollars high. Evan sighed. Then he slowly folded the cheque into his wallet.

He ordered a suit from one of the town tailors and paid ten dollars down.

Bill Watson usually wrote the cash book and the cash items. He saw the cheque from Hometon and made mental note of it. A day or two later he asked Evan for a loan to pay the bank guarantee premium, and got five dollars.

When his suit was finished Nelson was a few dollars short. He went on the tailor's books. The same night Julia Watersea called him up and asked him down. He felt obliged to take some candy along.

"How much should I spend for a box of chocolates, Bill?" he asked.

"Nothing less than a buck, kid," replied Bill, almost rendering his speech ambiguous.

Evan's salary was still two hundred a year--dollars, not pounds. The box of candy he bought consumed almost two days' earnings.

CHAPTER V.

_MOVED._

While Evan and Julia ate their candy and put their digestive organs out of tune, Frankie Arling sat reading stray poems from her French reader.

She repeated to herself, in the little nook she called her study, a verse of De Musset's:

"J'ai perdu ma force et ma vie, Et mes amis et ma gaiete; J'ai perdu jusqu'a, la fierte Qui faisait croire a mon genie."

That was about how she felt. She had cried considerably when Our Banker first went away. Now she did not yield to the temptation of tears, but she was miserably lonesome and sad--the more so since his letters grew less and less frequent and less intimate.

Frankie was a girl of seventeen and as romantic as those young creatures are made. She had always been Evan's "school girl," and he had always been her juvenile hero. Perhaps theirs was the commonest form of love-affair, but the character of the affection could never rightly be called "common." Incompatibility makes affection commonplace and mean, but Frankie and Evan were suited to each other.

They both knew they were, and that knowledge made them feel sure of the ideals they cherished.

Because she clung to her ideals so tenaciously Frankie was often very wretched; she was so on the night of Evan's visit to the Waterseas with the box of candy. Not that she knew about it--but she began to doubt the impossibility of such happenings. His letters had gradually fed a suspicion in her mind.

An idea occurred to Frankie. She would call up Mr. Dunlap, the Hometon teller, and invite him up to spend the evening; then she would question him concerning the fickleness of bankclerks.

Dunlap answered her telephone call with the words: "Well, Miss Arling, I'm working to-night--but I'll gladly postpone work for _you_." He accepted the invitation with alacrity and seemed quite pleased with the verandah welcome he received. Mrs. Arling was out, and he could not occupy the parlor alone with the daughter; but still he had reason to be thankful.

"How is Evan getting along?" was one of the first questions the bankclerk asked.

"Very well, I think," answered Frankie; then, settling immediately to business: "Tell me, Mr. Dunlap, is bank work very exciting?"

"Oh, I don't know. There are some things about it that keep up your spirits. Not so much the bank work itself as the a.s.sociations."

"What do you mean by 'a.s.sociations'?"

"Well--when a fellow gets moved, for instance, he meets new--"

"Girls?" suggested Frankie, smiling faintly.

"Yes--like you."

Miss Arling did not recognize the attempt at gallantry.

"I suppose you have been moved pretty often, haven't you, Mr. Dunlap?"

"Six times in four years."

"Have you a girl in every place where you lived?"

"Not exactly," he laughed. "Of course, I write an odd letter to somebody in every one of those towns."

The school-girl had found out what she wanted to know. If Dunlap had come to visit her with any idea that she had forgotten her school-"fellow," Nelson, he could not have cherished the illusion long, for she seemed to lose interest in everything, all very suddenly, and when he suggested that he probably ought to go back and balance the ledger-keeper's books she encouraged him in so generous an undertaking.

A man with six girls knows when he is wanted.

Frankie went in to her piano and played "Sleep and Forget." That was a strange selection for a young school-girl to choose; but young girls are born dramatists. Darkness had fallen and the stars were beginning to peep. She was on the verandah again, looking at the evening sky, wondering why people left home and loved ones for the other things, wealth, fame, pleasure, change. The night had sadness in its countenance--which it reflected to the girl's. She was quite like a summer's evening. She should have been, perhaps, more like a summer morning.

While the Hometon girl stood on her father's verandah, gazing and philosophizing, Evan stood on the Watersea verandah at Mt. Alban, gazing also, but not reflecting. He was looking into the eyes of Julia, rather steadily for a lad of less than eighteen, and talking.

"Mighty good of you to take in a stranger like me," he was saying.

"My dear boy" (Julia was past nineteen), "we just love to have your company. Come any time you can."