Meanwhile he had retained all his old friends—no one who had known Bindo was in a hurry to part company with him—but he had made other and less reputable ones. The strange and (to me) disquieting element in the situation was that he never, even now, seemed to be in want of money. Yet Harry’s illness alone must have cost him a fortune. All his old luxuries were resumed. Dinners to his friends, at which Bindo was always paymaster, with periodical trips to Brighton and Bournemouth for change, succeeded one another with the same regularity as when the boy was earning £10 a night. “Where _does_ the money come from?” I asked myself again and again. Alas! the knowledge was to come soon. Late one evening, as I was finishing an article for the editor who employed me, Thorne and Eastonville called at my rooms. That they had come on no pleasant errand was written on their faces. “Charlie,” said Thorne, “we are here on a disagreeable business. I hope it may prove less disagreeable than it looks. The fact is we’ve been losing a lot of things for some time past; at least we’ve tried our level best to _think_ we’ve lost them. But it won’t do. The thing is far too systematic to be accidental. Sometimes it has been money—a sovereign or two at a time; then it was a diamond ring of Eastonville’s that went, and then some valuable scarf-pins of mine. So the thing must be stopped. But who has done it? I may as well out with it at once, though it burns my throat to tell it. We can’t help fancying it’s Bindo. No one but he has had access to our rooms at all hours, and you know how suspicious he has made us all by the pile of money he’s been spending.” “Yes: it _is_ Bindo, Thorne.” What was the good of attempting to deny it, when it flashed across me in a moment where all his jewellery had come from? No, not all perhaps. Probably—for I never asked him—he had started with articles that were legitimately his own, and then, when these had failed him, had been tempted to supplement them less creditably in the time of Harry’s need. Of course we found the things, as I anticipated, at Attenborough’s; all of them, that is, but one. Bindo was not the boy to try and hide his work, as an expert would have done, by distributing the articles at different shops, or even by signing under an assumed name. On the contrary, there was a contemptuous candour in his method of dealing that actually surprised and puzzled us for a moment at starting. I would allow no one but myself to liquidate on behalf of Bindo. But I as steadily refused to be the bearer to him of the discovery we had made. None of the others volunteered for the office, or showed the faintest ambition to be the one selected for the murder of a friendship. So we cast lots for the office, whose it should be, in true melodramatic style, and the lot fell upon me.