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“Understand, Sir Bale? I do, sir — quite.”

“I daresay quite” he repeated with an angry sneer. “Here, sir, is an odd coincidence: you want a hundred pounds, and you can’t earn it, and you can’t borrow it — there’s another way, it seems — but I have got it — a Bank-of-England note of £100 — locked up in that desk;” and he poked the end of his cane against the brass lock of it viciously. “There it is, and there are the papers you work at; and there are two keys — I’ve got one and you have the other — and devil another key in or out of the house has any one living. Well, do you begin to see? Don’t mind. I don’t want any damned lying about it.”

Feltram was indeed beginning to see that he was suspected of something very bad, but exactly what, he was not yet sure; and being a man of that unhappy temperament which shrinks from suspicion, as others do from detection, he looked very much put out indeed.

“Ha, ha! I think we do begin to see,” said Sir Bale savagely. “It’s a bore, I know, troubling a fellow with a story that he knows before; but I’ll make mine short. When I take my key, intending to send the note to pay the crown and quit-rents that you know — you — you — no matter — you know well enough must be paid, I open it so — and so — and look there, where I left it, for my note; and the note’s gone — you understand, the note’s gone!”