"Well, the doctor came as Lennox died, and Mr Alwyn made him stay with us and keep us in sight while, without a word to one another, we each wrote down what the dying man had said to us; and the doctor witnessed that we had written it without speech with one another since Lennox's death. Then we took the papers before the nearest judge, and made our affidavits that they contained a true confession. But it's all on our words after all; howsoever, on that confession we came back." "Well, Harry," said Mrs Stroud, "I'd take my dying oath you was innocent. But whatever made you decamp just at that moment?" "My father knew where I was," said Harry. "He knew I joined Mr Alwyn. But he declared that after the jewels had been named in connection with us he'd never go home, if they were found twenty times over, without the squire made him an apology." Mrs Stroud sat and looked at her recovered nephew, at his good clothes, his watch chain, his air of undoubted respectability, and also at the unembarrassed and cheerful air with which he faced her. "What are you going to do now?" she said. "That must depend on Mr Alwyn. He thought Mr Edgar would perhaps have helped him search, or told him how the land lay, anyhow; so he wrote him a note appointing a meeting, which I gave to little Wyn Warren in the wood. It seems he lost it; and, though the meeting came about, Mr Alwyn was so distracted at the state in which he found his poor brother that he never laid any plans at all. When I joined him he couldn't hardly speak of him. 'Twas the heaviest punishment of all, he said." "Ah, poor young gentleman," said Mrs Stroud; "it's a sad business, and I doubt he's not long for this world. But do I take you to say, Harry, that you're a family man?" Harry nodded, and produced a photograph of his wife and baby, and another of the substantial house in which he lived; and over the tea a great many more questions and answers were interchanged. Harry heard all about his sisters, and where Florence was, and what his brother George was doing. He couldn't help enjoying the joke of appearing to his aunt in so new a light--even while he asked with real affection after Mattie, and studied the photographs of his family in his aunt's book. He could not make himself known to his father, he said, until Mr Alwyn had taken some action, and, of course, he could not but hope that the explanation of the lost jewels would be accepted at Ashcroft. His coming to see his aunt had been, he said, a sudden thought, prompted by Mr Alwyn's shock and distress at his brother's illness. "I didn't know then what I might find at the old place," he said. "But if you could keep my coming quiet for a few days, aunt, it would be all for the better."