“Shall I tell you the only fact known to me which may have bearing on your family’s belief, Mr. Bradshaw?” “I wish you would. That there’s a fact of any sort behind it is news to me.” “A man called Bradshaw was hanged for the murder of an ancestress of mine. It is possible you are descended from this man.” “By gum!” said Tom. “That’s an ugly factor. I didn’t know I was in for one like that when I came here asking you to help me with the truth. Well, we’ll publish it. It’ll not help me, but I’m for the truth whether it’s for me or against me.” Sir Philip crossed the room to him. “Shake hands, Mr. Bradshaw,” he said. “We’ll tell the truth in this together, but at the moment we’ve not gone very far. Your opinion of your family in general makes you rather too ready to believe that they are in fact the descendants of this murderer.” “Thank you, Sir Philip,” said Tom. “But I’m not doubting it.” “What we can do, at any rate, is to go together through the records of the firm. Or I will employ some one who is accustomed to research and we will issue his report. My cupboard may have a skeleton in it, but it is open to you to investigate.” Tom Bradshaw sweated hard. “It’s making a mountain out of a mole hill,” he said. He had never, since the half-timers taught him commonsense, had anything but contempt for the legend of the Bradshaws; at every stage of his upward path it had embarrassed him, but never had he felt before to-day that it pursued him with such poisonous malignity. He had no hope that any point favoring the Bradshaws would emerge from an examination of the records; it would be a fair examination of dispassionate title deeds and its fairness would be the more damaging. And he had pleaded for the truth, he had put this rapier into his political opponents’ hands! The Labor candidate was the descendant of a murderer! “Thank you again,” he said. “Oh, as to that,” said Sir Philip, “the existence of this belief interests me. If our searcher finds any grounds for it here or in parish registers or elsewhere, I shall of course acknowledge them. But the odds are that the legend springs from a perverted view of the murder of which I have told you, and if that is so, I fear the disclosure will hardly profit you.” “It won’t,” said Tom gloomily. “But it’ll shut their silly mouths.” If, he reflected, it did not open them in full cry on a new and odious scent. “So we go on with it?” “We go on.”