On the first of December he cashed a cheque in the town, as usual; and he paid Barbara’s wages and the coal merchant, and the month’s bill for kerosene, and the butcher and the grocer, and the baker, and that was practically all; and he went to bed that night feeling that whatever happened there was a whole month before another first came round, and he owed no one anything more for the present, and Newton would not starve, and could have his Christmas turkey, if it was to be the last he ever ate, poor boy.

On the morning of December third it was still snowing slush, though it was more like real snow now, and the air was much colder; and by and by, when Overholt had read a letter that Barbara brought him, he felt so terribly cold all at once that his teeth chattered, and then he was so hot that the perspiration ran down his forehead, and he steadied himself against the heavy glass case of the Motor a moment and then almost tumbled into a sitting posture on the stool before his work-table, and his head fell forward on his hands, as if he were fainting.

The letter said that his account was overdrawn to the extent of three hundred and fifty-two dollars and thirteen cents, including the cheque he had drawn on the thirty-first, and would he please make a deposit at his earliest convenience?

It had been just a little mistake in arithmetic, that was all.  He had started with the wrong balance in his note-book, and what he thought was credit was debit, but the bank where he had kept all the money that had been put up for the Motor, had wished to be friendly and good-natured to the great inventor and had not returned his cheques with N.G. on them; and if his attention had already been called to his deficit, he must have forgotten to open the letter.  Like all men who are much talked of in the newspapers, though they may be as poor as Job’s turkey, he received a great many circulars addressed by typewriter, and the only letters he really cared for were from his wife, so that when he was very hard at work or much preoccupied the others accumulated somewhere in the workshop, and were often forgotten.

What was perfectly clear this morning was that starvation was sitting on the doorstep and that he had no moral right whatever to the dinner Barbara was already beginning to cook, nor to another to-morrow, nor to any more; for he was a proud man, and ashamed of debt, though he mixed up debit and credit so disgracefully.

He sat there half an hour, as he had let himself fall forward, only moving a little, so that his forehead rested on his arm instead of his hands, because that was a little more comfortable, and just then he did not want to see anything, least of all the Motor.  When he rose at last the sleeve of his coat was all wet with the perspiration from his forehead.  He left the workshop, half shutting his eyes in order not to see the Motor; he was sure the thing was grinning at him behind the plate glass.  It had two round brass valves near the top that looked like yellow eyeballs, and a lever at the bottom with double arms and a cross-bar, which made him think of an iron jaw when he was in one of his fits of nervous depression.