"My wife saw you alone when she was dying. She was evidently anxious to see you alone. It was like her, even then, to think of others. If you tell me, on your word of honour, that she asked you to go up to the flat and burn that I O U, and that she told you where to find it--No; if she even gave you leave, as you were no doubt anxious on the subject,--if you assure me that she yielded to your entreaties, and that she even gave you leave to destroy it,--I will believe it. I will accept your statement. The last wish of my wife--if you say it _was_ her wish--is enough for me." Monkey Brand looked out of the window at the still noonday sunshine. "I would abide by it," he said, and his face worked. "She never spoke to me on the subject of the I O U," said Janet, two large tears rolling down her quivering cheeks. "She never gave me leave to burn it. I didn't burn it. I burnt nothing." "Janet," almost shrieked Fred, nearly beside himself. "Janet, don't you see that--that---- Confess. Tell him you did it. We both know you did it. Own the truth." Janet looked from one to the other. "I burnt nothing," she said, but her eyes fell. Her word had never been doubted before. Both men saw she was lying. Monkey Brand's face changed. It became once again as many poor wretches had seen it, whose hard-wrung money had gone to buy his wife's gowns and diamonds. He got up. He took his glove out of the crown of his hat, put on his hat in the room, and walked slowly out of the house. In the doorway he looked back at Janet, and she saw, directed at her for the first time, the expression with which she was to grow familiar, that which meets the swindler and the liar. The brother and sister watched in silence the rigid little departing figure, as it climbed back wrong leg first into the dog-cart and drove away. Then Fred burst out. "Oh! you fool, you fool!" he stammered, shaking from head to foot. "Why didn't you say Mrs Brand told you to burn it? His wife was his soft side. Oh! my God! what a chance, and you didn't take it. That man will ruin us yet. I saw it in his face." "But she didn't tell me to burn it." Janet looked like a bewildered, distressed child, who suddenly finds herself in a room full of machinery of which she understands nothing, and whose inadvertent touch, as she tries to creep away, has set great malevolent wheels whirring all round her. "I daresay she didn't," said Fred fiercely, and he flung out of the room. He went and stood a long time leaning over the fence into the paddock where his yearlings were. "It's an awful thing to be a fool," he said to himself. CHAPTER XII "Il n'est aucun mal qui ne naisse, en dernière analyse--d'une pensée étroite, ou d'un sentiment mediocre." --MAETERLINCK.