Upon his arrival home Dick found his mother in such an acute state of distress that for the first few moments of their interview she seemed to be quite incapable of making any intelligible statement: she could do nothing but weep copiously upon her stalwart son's shoulder and gasp that they were ruined--utterly and irretrievably ruined! At length, however, the lad managed to extract from Mrs Maitland the statement that she had seen, in the previous morning's papers, an account of the suicide of Mr Jonas Cuthbertson, a solicitor; and, judging from the name and other particulars given in the published account, that it must be their Mr Cuthbertson, she had hurried up to town and called at Cuthbertson's chambers, where her worst apprehensions had received complete and terrible confirmation. From the particulars supplied by Mr Herbert, Cuthbertson's chief clerk, it appeared that "Mr Jonas", after walking worthily in his father's footsteps for two years, had become infected with the gambling craze, and, first losing all his own money, had finally laid hands upon as much of his clients' property as he could obtain access to, until, his ill luck still pursuing him, he had lost that also, and then had sought to evade the consequences of his misdeeds by blowing out his brains with two shots from a revolver. This final act of folly had been perpetrated two days before the account of it in the papers had fallen under Mrs Maitland's notice, and in the interim there had, of course, been time only to make a very cursory examination into the affairs of the suicide, but that examination had sufficed to reveal the appalling fact that every available security, both of his own and of his clients, had disappeared, while sufficient evidence had been discovered to show pretty clearly what had led to their disappearance.