“Are you open to an offer?”

“I’m open to almost anything,” Jack answered, with a puzzled look.

“Well,” and Mr. Fletcher settled back in his chair, “I can give you the situation in five minutes.  I’ve been in this business over thirty years —­yes; over thirty-five years.  It has grown, little by little, until it’s a pretty big business.  I’ve a partner, a first-rate man—­he is in Europe now—­who attends to most of the buying.  And the business keeps spreading out, and needs more care.  I’m not as young as I was I shall be sixty-four in October—­and I can’t work right along as I used to.  I find that I come later and go away earlier.  It isn’t the ’work exactly, but the oversight, the details; and the fact is that I want somebody near me whom I can trust, whether I’m here or whether I’m away.  I’ve got good, honest, faithful clerks—­if there was one I did not trust, I wouldn’t have him about.  But do you know, Jack,” it was the first time in the interview that he had used this name—­“there is something in blood.”

“Yes,” Jack assented.

“Well, I want a confidential clerk.  That’s it.”

“Me?” he asked.  He was thinking rapidly while Mr. Fletcher had been speaking; something like a revolution was taking place in his mind, and when he asked this, the suggestion took on a humorous aspect—­a humorous view of anything had not occurred to him in months.

“You are just the man.”

“I can be confidential,” Jack rejoined, with the old smile on his face that had been long a stranger to it, “but I don’t know that I can be a clerk.”

Mr. Fletcher was good enough to laugh at this pleasantry.

“That’s all right.  It isn’t much of a position.  We can make the salary twenty-five hundred dollars for a starter.  Will you try it?”

Jack got up and went to the area window, and looked out a moment upon the boxes in the dim court.  Then he came back and stood by Mr. Fletcher, and put his hand on the desk.

“Yes, I’ll try.”

“Good.  When will you begin?”

“Now.”

“That’s good.  No time like now.  Wait a bit, and I’ll show you about the place before we go to lunch.  You’ll get hold of the ropes directly.”

This was Mr. Fletcher’s veteran joke.

At three o’clock Mr. Fletcher closed his desk.  It was time to take his train.  “Tomorrow, then,” he said, “we will begin in earnest.”

“What are the business hours here?” asked Jack.

“Oh, I am usually here from ten to three, but the business hours are from nine till the business is done.  By-the-way, why not run out with me and spend the night, and we can talk the thing over?”

There was no reason why he should not go, and he went.  And that was the way John Corlear Delancy was initiated in the string business in the old house of Fletcher & Co.

XXII

Few battles are decisive, and perhaps least of all those that are won by a sudden charge or an accident, and not as the result of long-maturing causes.  Doubtless the direction of a character or a career is often turned by a sudden act of the will or a momentary impotence of the will.  But the battle is not over then, nor without long and arduous fighting, often a dreary, dragging struggle without the excitement of novelty.