George Peddie occupied the important and responsible position of confidential clerk and teller in the Royal Bank, where he had been for twenty-two years, having entered the bank in a humble capacity at the age of fifteen. He was a member of a highly respectable family, and at one time his father had been rich, but bad times and unfortunate speculations ruined him. He had placed his children well, however, but George, being the youngest, did not get so good an education as the others, and he had to turn out earlier than they had done, owing to his father's reduced circumstances.

George was a smart lad, and the second year the manager of the bank promoted him. So he had gone on rising gradually, and at the end of twenty-two years he was a confidential clark with a salary of seven hundred a year.

Now, seven hundred a year was not a very big salary for a proud and ambitious man, perhaps, but George might have got on very well with it, might even have ranked as a well-to-do man amongst his aquaintances, had it not been for a skeleton in his cupboard. It is said that we all have our skeletons, but George's was a particularly gruesome one. Its mouldering bones were forever jangling in his ears. it confronted him at all times. If he invited a few friends to a quiet little feast, there at his board sat that grinning thing. His friends, of course, didn't see it, but he did. It took good care that he should never lose sight of it. If he was a guest anywhere his skeleton went with him. Even in church on Sunday it sat beside him; and when in summer he took his three weeks' holiday, that wretched, maddening thing accompanied him. He could not shake it off, possibly because, for one thing, he lacked resolution and firmness. He was a rather easy-going sort of fellow, and he could not muster up sufficient moral courage to fall and tackle that skeleton until he had broken it into a thousand pieces, and had flung the pieces to the four winds of heaven...