When Quixtus went to Lincoln’s Inn Fields one morning and found, instead of his partner, a letter from him stating that he had gone abroad and would remain there without an address for an indefinite time, Quixtus was surprised. When he had summoned the managing clerk and together they had opened Marrable’s safe, both he and the clerk were bewildered; and after he had spent an hour or two with a chartered accountant, for whom he had hurriedly telephoned, he grew sick from horror and amazement. Later in the day he heard through the police that a warrant was out for Samuel Marrable’s arrest. In the course of time he learned that Samuel Marrable had done everything that a solicitor should not do. He had misappropriated trust-funds; he had made away with bearer-bonds; he had falsified accounts; he had forged transfers; he had speculated in wild-cat concerns; he had become the dupe of a gang of company promoters known throughout the City as “Gehenna Unlimited.” He had robbed the widow; he had robbed the orphan; he had robbed the firm; he had robbed with impunity for many years; but when, in desperation, he had tried to rob “Gehenna Unlimited,” they were too much for him. So Samuel Marrable had fled the country. Thus fell the first thunderbolt. Quixtus saw the fair repute of “Quixtus and Son” shattered in an instant, his own name tarnished, himself—and this was the most cruel part of the matter—betrayed and fooled by the man in whom he had placed his boundless trust. Marrable, whom he had known since he was a child of five; with whom he had gone to pantomimes, exhibitions, and such like junketings when he was a boy; who had first guided his reluctant feet through the mazes of the law; who had stood with him by his father’s death-bed; who was bound to him by all the intimacies of a lifetime; on whose devotion he had counted as unquestioningly as a child on his mother’s love—Marrable to be a rogue and a rascal, not a man at his wits’ end yielding to a sudden temptation, but a deliberate, systematic villain—it was all but unthinkable. Yet here were irrefragable proofs, as the law took its course. And all through the nightmare time that followed until the trial—for the poor fugitive was soon hunted down and haled back to London—when his days were spent in helpless examination of confusing figures and bewildering transactions, the insoluble human problem was uppermost in his mind. How could the man have done these things? Marrable had sobbed over his father’s grave and had put his arm affectionately round his shoulders and led him away to the mourning coach. Marrable had stood with him by another open grave, that of his dead wife, and had comforted him with affectionate sympathy. To the very end not a sinister look had appeared in his honest, capable eyes. On the very day of his flight he had lunched with Quixtus in the Savoy grill-room. He had laughed and jested and told Quixtus a funny story or two. When they parted: