"No," said Tod, "he did not bank with them. A day or two before Clement-Pell burst up, he drove to our house as bold as brass, asking my father in the most off-hand manner to let him have a cheque for two hundred pounds until the next day. The Squire did let him have it, without scruple, and of course lost it. He would have let him have two thousand had Pell asked for it." "But that was a fraud. Pell might have been punished for it." "I don't know that it was so much a fraud as many other things Pell did, and might have been punished for," observed Tod. "At any rate, not as great a one. He escaped out of the way, as I dare say you know, sir, and his family escaped with him. It was hard on them. They had been brought up in the greatest possible extravagance, in all kinds of luxury. This one, Fabian, was in the army. He, of course, had to retire. His own debts would have forced that step upon him, apart from the family disgrace." "Did he re-enter it, I wonder." Tod laughed. "_I_ should say not. He went to Australia. Not above a year ago I heard that he was still there. He must have come back here fortune-hunting; _bread_-hunting; and passed himself off as Captain Collinson the better to do it. Miss Mina Knox's seven thousand pounds was a prize to fight for." "That's it!" cried Sam. "Dan has said all along it was the money he was after, dishonourable wretch, not Mina herself. He cares too much for Madame St. Vincent to care for Mina: at least we think so. How did he get the funds, I wonder, that he has been flourishing about upon?" "Won them at billiards," suggested Tod. "No," said Sam, "I don't think that. By all accounts he lost more than he won in the billiard-rooms." Dr. Knox looked up from a reverie. "Was it himself that Major Leckie saw?--and did he pass himself off as another man to escape detection? Did he go off for the remainder of the week lest the major should look him up again?" And we knew it must have been so.