Mr. Taynton closed his eyes a moment after looking at it. Then he took his quill, and wrote quickly. "You would swear to that, too, would you not, Timmins?" he asked. "Why, God bless me yes, sir," said he. "Swear to it on the book." The door opened and as Godfrey Mills came in, Mr. Taynton tweaked the paper out of Timmins's hand, and tore it up. It might perhaps seem strange to dear Mills that his partner had been forging his signature, though only in jest. "'Fraid I'm rather late," said Mills. "Not at all, my dear fellow," said Taynton without the slightest touch of ill-humour. "How are you? There's very little to do; I want your signature to this and this, and your careful perusal of that. Mrs. Assheton's letter? No, that only concerns me; I have dealt with it." A quarter of an hour was sufficient, and at the end Timmins carried the papers away leaving the two partners together. Then, as soon as the door closed, Mills spoke. "I've been thinking over our conversation of last night," he said, "and there are some points I don't think you have quite appreciated, which I should like to put before you." Something inside Mr. Taynton's brain, the same watcher perhaps who looked at Morris so closely the evening before, said to him. "He is going to try it on." But it was not the watcher but his normal self that answered. He beamed gently on his partner. "My dear fellow, I might have been sure that your quick mind would have seen new aspects, new combinations," he said. Mills leaned forward over the table. "Yes, I have seen new aspects, to adopt your words," he said, "and I will put them before you. These financial operations, shall we call them, have been going on for two years now, have they not? You began by losing a large sum in South Africans--" "We began," corrected Mr. Taynton, gently. He was looking at the other quite calmly; his face expressed no surprise at all; if there was anything in his expression beyond that of quiet kindness, it was perhaps pity. "I said 'you,'" said Mills in a hectoring tone, "and I will soon explain why. You lost a large sum in South Africans, but won it back again in Americans. You then again, and again contrary to my advice, embarked in perfect wild-cat affairs, which ended in our--I say 'our' here--getting severely scratched and mauled. Altogether you have frittered away £30,000, and have placed the remaining ten in a venture which to my mind is as wild as all the rest of your unfortunate ventures. These speculations have, almost without exception, been choices of your own, not mine. That was _one_ of the reasons why I said 'you,' not 'we.'" He paused a moment. "Another reason is," he said, "because without any exception the transactions have taken place on your advice and in your name, not in mine." That was a sufficiently meaning statement, but Mills did not wish his partner to be under any misapprehension as to what he implied.