“I have concluded to permit you to attend to these matters for me—­get through them the best you can in your own way without bothering me with them; do just as you would if I were away on a vacation, we will say, and left everything in your charge—­all matters for you to settle as you deemed best.”

The gentleman looked surprised and bowed gravely.  “I can attend to most of the documents connected with the firm, but there are a few matters I see there that the parties interested might object to if they saw the name of Manager Wright attached instead of the name of the proprietor.”

“In that case, show me where you want me to sign, and I’ll put down my name here and now, to end the matter.”

“Without first examining the documents carefully?” asked the manager, in amazement, thinking how slipshod in his business methods the new proprietor of the great establishment was becoming since he suddenly found himself raised from a poor cashier to a multi-millionaire, and thinking that good old Mr. Marsh would turn over in his grave if he had heard that.

“Thank Heaven all that is off my mind,” muttered Kendale, breathing freer as the manager left the office with the papers, adding, thoughtfully:  “I hope I won’t have to come in contact with that man very often.  I felt so uncomfortable that it was by the greatest effort I could control myself—­keep from springing from my chair, seizing my hat and fairly flying out of this place.

“His keen gray eyes seemed to pierce through and through me.  I expected every moment to hear him shout out:  ’Come hither, everybody—­quickly; this man is not Lester Armstrong, striking though the resemblance is.  Send for the police, that this mystery may be solved at once!’”

He was not far wrong in his suspicions.

Manager Wright had quitted the private office with a deeply knitted brow and a troubled expression on his face.

“The change in Lester Armstrong since yesterday is amazing,” he mused.  “Long years of dissipation could not have told more on him than the change these few hours have worked.  He must have been out drinking and carousing all night long—­the odor of the room from the fumes of strong liquor was almost unbearable; it was blue with smoke, too, and Lester Armstrong always led us to believe that he had never smoked a cigar in his life; and, worst of all, from a gentleman he has suddenly turned into a libertine, if I am any judge of features.

“I cannot begin to account for the great change in him; it mystifies me quite as much as it did the store detectives and Mr. Conway, the cashier.  It is all terribly wrong—­somehow—­somewhere.  If it were not that I have been here so many years I would tender Mr. Armstrong my resignation.  I am not at all satisfied—­and yet, yesterday, when Mr. Armstrong called me into his private office and we had that long talk about the business matters of the house, I felt that all would go well; to-day