Mrs Frankau’s explanation of the flight of Ryland is scarcely plausible. It is not credible that a man who is engaged in a frantic search for a lost mistress would remain in close hiding, posing as an invalid, only venturing abroad after dark. Nor is it a tenable assumption that he attempted to commit suicide in a fit of despair because he fancied that he was being arrested for debt, and thus might lose all chance of finding his _chère amie_. One of the strongest pleas in his defence was that his fortune was ‘princely’ and he protested that he fled because he could not find the man from whom he had received the fatal bill. It is a strange coincidence that the discovery of the fraud upon the East India Company should have taken place on the eve of his disappearance. Moreover, he was not arrested for the forgery that secured his conviction. The warrant charged him with counterfeiting two other bills of exchange to the value of £7114 (as reference to the advertisement columns of the daily papers of April 3 will show), and it was not until this publicity that Mr Moreland, the banker, examined the bill for £210, which Ryland had deposited with his house. Thus the accusation of one crime led to the discovery of another! And it is still more strange that the artist should have cashed an East India Company bill of the value of £210 on September 19, 1782, while on November 4 he should have handed to his banker another bill--an exact copy of the first--bearing a similar date, denomination, and acceptances. Although these two identical bills came into Ryland’s possession within the space of a few weeks, he did not seek an explanation of the remarkable coincidence. A careful survey of all the facts must convince everyone of the guilt of the unfortunate engraver, but it is a pleasure to be able to agree with Mrs Frankau--except in some minor details--in her contention that the evidence was not conclusive. Ryland was convicted because he failed to show that he had received the forged bill from another person, and to cast thus the burden of proof from the prosecution to the defence is quite foreign to the methods of a modern tribunal.