When she _did_ call the shilling was gone, and as Grantly and Mary were known to have been in the study, the squire came to the conclusion that one of them must have knocked against his table and brushed it off, and he gave it out that "unless they found it, and thus repaired the mischief and annoyance their carelessness had caused, he would not allow them to go to the dance that evening!" He never suspected that any member of his family would take the shilling, but he was ready to believe all things of their clumsiness. In vain did Grantly and Mary protest that they had never been near his desk; the squire might have been Sherlock Holmes himself, so certain was he as to the exactitude of his deductions. "The card has been pushed from where it was originally placed to the extreme edge of the table; the shilling must have been knocked off, and had doubtless rolled under some article of furniture; let them see to it that it was found; they might hunt there and then if they liked, as he would not require the room for half an hour." The consciousness of their innocence in no way sustained Grantly and Mary under the appalling prospect of losing the party. They had of course hunted frantically everywhere, but naturally had found no trace of the shilling. Ger sat quite still during the recital of their wrong's, his face growing paler and paler, and his honest grey eyes wider and wider in the horror of his knowledge. For he knew who had taken the shilling, and he knew also that it was his plain duty to right his innocent brother and sister. But at what a cost! He could not tell of Reggie, and yet it was so unlike Reggie for it was . . . even to himself Ger hardly liked to confess what it was--and he had gone off in such a hurry! To Ger, a shilling seemed a very large sum, his own greatest wealth, amassed after many weeks of hoarding, had once reached five pence halfpenny, nearly all in farthings; and he even found himself conjecturing the sort of monetary difficulty into which Reggie had fallen, and from which a shilling might extricate him. He knew there were such things as "debts," and that the army was "very expensive," for he had heard his grandfather say so. Like many extremely upright people Ger was gentle in his judgments of others. Himself of the most crystalline honesty, he could yet conceive of circumstances wherein a like probity might be hard for somebody else: at all costs poor Reggie must be screened, but it was equally clear to him that his brother and sister must not lose the pleasure long looked-forward-to as the opening joy of the holidays.