Mr Hancock had fallen from fury into a thoughtful mood: one of the sharpest brains in London was engaged in unravelling the meaning to get at the inner-meaning of all this. "My sister came round to the office some time ago asking me to spare you for an hour as she wished for your advice about a lease. That, of course, was all humbug: she wanted you for the purpose of talking about me?" "That is true." "The lease was never mentioned?" "Not once, Mr James." "All the conversation was about me and my welfare?" "That it was." "Now see here, Bridgewater, cast your memory back. Is this the first time in your life that my sister has invited you to my house in Gordon Square to discuss my welfare?" "No indeed, sir. I've been there before." "How many times?" Bridgewater assumed the cast of countenance he always assumed when engaged in reckoning. "That's enough," said Hancock, "don't count. Now tell me, when did she first begin to take you into her confidence--twenty years ago?" "Yes, Mr James, fully that." Hancock made a sound like a groan. "And twenty years ago it was the same tale: 'Protect my brother from a designing woman.'" "Why, it was, and that's the truth," said Bridgewater, as if the fact had just been discovered by him. "And you did your best, told her all about me and my movements, as far as you knew them, and mixed and muddled, and made an ass of yourself and a fool of me----" "Oh, Mr James!" "Hold your tongue!--a fool of me. Do you know, John Bridgewater, that you have been aiding and abetting in a conspiracy--a conspiracy unpunishable by law, but still a conspiracy--hold your tongue!--you are innocent of everything but of being a fool; indeed, I ought not to call any man a fool, for I have been a fool myself, and I ought to have seen that the one end and aim of my sister's life was to secure her position as my keeper, and her tenure of my house. You have shown me at one flash a worm that has crawled through my past, cankering and corroding all it touched. Money, money, money--that is my sister's creed. I am not young, Bridgewater, and it seems to me that if instead of living all these years side by side with this money-grub, I had lived side by side with a wife, my lot would have been a better one. I might have had children, grown-up sons now, daughters--things that make an interest for us in our old age. Between me and all that has come my sister. That woman has a very strong will. I see many things in the past now, ay, twenty years ago, that I can explain. Bridgewater, you have done me a great injury, but you did it for the best, and I forgive you. Half the people in this world are pawns and chess-pieces, moved about by the men and women of intellect who form the other half. If you had possessed eyes to see, you might have seen that the really designing woman against whom I should have been protected, was the woman with whom you leagued yourself--my sister."