“I don’t know how to thank you enough, sir, for your leniency,” he said, when he had written, in as few words as possible, the statement of the facts. “Well, just let the affair be a lesson to you,” said Roy. “There’s a great deal said about drunkenness being the national sin, but I believe it is betting that is at the root of half the evils of the day. Fortunately, things are now set straight as far as may be, yet remember that you have wronged and perhaps irrevocably injured a perfectly innocent man.” “I bitterly regret it, sir; I do, indeed,” said Darnell. “I hope you do,” said Roy; “I am sure you ought to.” And while Darnell still reiterated thanks, and apologies, and abject regrets, Roy stalked out of the shop and made his way back to the station. “To think that I believed in that cur, and doubted Falck!” he said to himself with disgust. “And yet, could any one have seemed more respectable than Darnell? more thoroughly trustworthy? And how could I disbelieve the evidence that was so dead against Frithiof? Sigrid and Cecil trusted him, and I ought to have done so too, I suppose; but women seem to me to have a faculty for that sort of thing which we are quite without.” Then, after a time, he remembered that the last barrier that parted him from Sigrid was broken down; and it was just as well that he had the railway carriage to himself, for he began to sing so jubilantly that the people in the next compartment took him for a school-boy returning for his Christmas holidays. It had been arranged that if he could catch the express from Plymouth he should meet his father at the shop, and arriving at Paddington at half-past six he sprang into a hansom and drove as quickly as possible to Regent Street. Frithiof just glanced at him inquiringly as he passed through the shop, then, reassured by the expression of his face, turned once more to the fidgety and impatient singing-master who, for the last quarter of an hour, had been keeping him hard at work in hunting up every conceivable song that was difficult to find, and which, when found, was sure to prove unsatisfactory. He wondered much what had passed at Plymouth, and when at last he had got rid of his customer, Roy returned to the shop with such evident excitement and triumph in his manner that old Foster thought he must be taking leave of his senses. “My father wants to speak to you, Frithiof,” he said. And Frithiof followed him into the little inner room which had been the scene of such disagreeable interviews in the past. A strange, dreamlike feeling came over him as he recalled the wretched summer day when the detective had searched him, and in horrible, bewildered misery he had seen the five-pound note, lying on that same leather-covered table, an inexplicable mystery and a damning evidence against him.