The story
“The old broker was very wealthy, but he was very old and very homely. In his younger days he had been too mean and stingy to marry, and as the years passed he could not see any reason for giving up his liberty. Finally the time came when he fell in love with his stenographer. She was young and pretty, but they did not have one taste in common and had they married their life would undoubtedly have been decidedly unhappy. Just the same, the broker proposed and was mighty surprised when the girl rejected him. She did not tell him who his favorite rival was, but he speedily learned that the lucky man was one of his own clerks, a handsome chap drawing an extremely small salary. The broker at first planned all sorts of things, such as discharging the young couple or intimidating them in some manner, and was still brooding over revenge that evening when he fell asleep at his own handsome fireplace. Naturally he dreamed of what he would like to do, and in his dreams he cleverly rid himself of his rival by proving him guilty of burglary; then there was no bar to his marriage with the girl, especially after (in his dreams) the young convict had been shot down while trying to escape from prison.
“If the dream had stopped there, perhaps the old broker would have tried something of that kind, for he was a man absolutely without conscience. Maybe a good angel took a hand in the development of the dream. The broker imagined that after he had proposed to the girl, the spirit of the dead convict came between them, haunted him in a most unpleasant way, and finally choked him so vigorously that he was glad to wake up. Now although the broker was old and inclined to be foolish in some matters, he had lots of sense otherwise. He took the dream as a warning of what might have been, and quickly decided that no woman in the world was worth such torments as he had just gone through, so he called the young couple into his office, raised the bridegroom’s pay, and bade them marry and be happy forever afterwards.”
Summary from The Moving Picture World · 6 December 1913
