It had been Cotherstone's life-long endeavour to forget all about the event of thirty years ago, and to a large extent he had succeeded in dulling his memory. But Kitely had brought it all back--and now everything was fresh to him. His brows knitted and his face grew dark as he thought of one thing in his past of which Kitely had spoken so easily and glibly--the dock. He saw himself in that dock again--and Mallalieu standing by him. They were not called Mallalieu and Cotherstone then, of course. He remembered what their real names were--he remembered, too, that, until a few minutes before, he had certainly not repeated them, even to himself, for many a long year. Oh, yes--he remembered everything--he saw it all again. The case had excited plenty of attention in Wilchester at the time--Wilchester, that for thirty years had been so far away in thought and in actual distance that it might have been some place in the Antipodes. It was not a nice case--even now, looking back upon it from his present standpoint, it made him blush to think of. Two better-class young working-men, charged with embezzling the funds of a building society to which they had acted as treasurer and secretary!--a bad case. The Court had thought it a bad case, and the culprits had been sentenced to two years' imprisonment. And now Cotherstone only remembered that imprisonment as one remembers a particularly bad dream. Yes--it had been real. His eyes, moody and brooding, suddenly shifted their gaze from the easy chair to his own hands--they were shaking. Mechanically he took up the whisky decanter from his desk, and poured some of its contents into his glass--the rim of the glass tinkled against the neck of the decanter. Yes--that had been a shock, right enough, he muttered to himself, and not all the whisky in the world would drive it out of him. But a drink--neat and stiff--would pull his nerves up to pitch, and so he drank, once, twice, and sat down with the glass in his hand--to think still more.