“They are papers of all kinds,” he said. “Letters, business documents, memoranda of every description, and two-thirds of them at least have reference to fraud and wrong of one kind or another. Not one penny that man possessed can have been honestly come by. His business was swindling; every one of his business transactions was founded on fraud. He can have had no faith or honesty of any sort or kind. He was living with another woman before he had been married a year. All that woman’s letters--he deceived her abominably, and it’s fortunate that she died--are annotated and endorsed like his ‘business’ memoranda; evidently kept deliberately as so much stored experience for future use!” Dr. Aston had listened with a keen, alert expression of intent interest. His cigar was forgotten, and he laid it down now as if impatient of any distraction, and leant forward over the table with his shrewd, kindly little eyes fixed eagerly on Falconer. Human nature was a hobby of his. Falconer’s confidence, or more truly perhaps the manner of it, had swept away all conventional barriers, and the elder man asked two or three quick, penetrating questions. “How far back do these records go?” he asked finally. “They cover five-and-twenty years, I should say,” returned Falconer. “The first note on a successful fraud must have been made when he was about four-and-twenty. Why, even then--when he was a mere boy--he must have been entirely without moral sense!” “Yes!” said the doctor, with a certain dry briskness of manner which was apt to come to him in moments of excitement. “That is exactly what he was, my boy! It was that, in conjunction with his powerful brain, that made him what you called, just now, dominating. It gave him vantage-ground over his fellow-men. He was as literally without moral sense as a colour-blind man is without a sense of colour, or a homicidal maniac without a sense of the sanctity of human life.” An expression of rather horrified and entirely uncomprehending protest spread itself over Falconer’s face. “Romayne was not mad,” he objected, with that incapacity for penetrating beneath the surface which was characteristic of him. “I never even heard that there was madness in the family.”