"Now, look here, Francis," he said, "I'll be open and plain with you. Of course, I know what you are alluding to; it would be weakness to pretend that I did not. But I assure you that you are on the wrong track. In your case you were found to have embezzled money, falsified accounts, and played the devil with old Lawson's affairs generally. You were prosecuted for it, and the whole case was in the papers. You got off on some technical point, but everybody knew that you were guilty, and everybody cut you dead--except, you will remember, your brother and sister, who continued to give you money, and were exceedingly kind to you. You were publicly disgraced, and there was no way of hushing the matter up at all. I am sorry to be obliged to put things so disagreeably----" "Go on! You needn't apologize," said Francis, with a rather husky laugh. "I know it all as well as you do. Go on." "I wish to point out the difference between our positions," said Oliver, calmly. "I did something a little shady myself, when I was a lad of twenty--at your instigation, mind; I signed old Romaine's name in the wrong place, didn't I? Old Romaine found it out, kept the thing quiet, and said that he had given me the money. I expressed my regret, and the matter blew over. What can you make out of that story?" He spoke very quietly, but there was a watchfulness in his eye, a slight twitching of his nostril, which proved him to be not entirely at his ease. His elder brother laughed aloud. "If that were all!" he said. "But you forget how base the action would seem if all the circumstances were known! how black the treachery and ingratitude to a man who was, after all, your benefactor. Rosalind never knew of that little episode, I believe? And she has a good deal of respect for her husband's memory. I should like to see what she would say about it." "She would not believe you, my dear boy." "But if I could prove it? If I had in my possession a full confession signed by yourself--the confession that Romaine insisted on, you will remember? What effect would that have upon her mind? And there was that other business, you know, about Mary's sister, whom you lured away from her home and ruined. _She_ is dead, but Mary is alive and can bear witness against you. How would you like these facts blazoned abroad and brought home to the mind of the pretty girl whom I saw you kissing a little while ago on the steps of a house in Upper Woburn Place? She is a Miss Kenyon, I know: an actress; I have heard all about her. Her brother is a doctor; and she has twenty thousand pounds in her own right." "You do seem, indeed, to know everything," said Oliver, with a sneer.