“Well, I will tell you. My father, who, although poorly blessed with the world’s goods, was a man of the strictest rectitude, and highly respected by all who knew him, procured him a post in a most respectable firm where, unfortunately, he had the handling of money. You can guess the sequel. To gratify his always extravagant tastes, of which Effington Hall is an illustration, he diverted several sums to his own use, displaying in their appropriation a remarkable ingenuity and cunning. When his defalcations came to light, the firm sent for my father. But for the respect in which they held him they would have prosecuted his son. My father and I between us--I had not very much money then--paid back the sum abstracted. We saved him from prosecution, on the condition that he should go out to Australia.” “Did Mrs. Barnard know of this?” asked Lydon. He had never yet been able to make up his mind whether this self-contained, rather silent woman knew anything of her brother’s actual pursuits. Jasper Stormont’s next words solved the problem. “Not a word. She had been recently married, and lived with her husband at a considerable distance. It was easy to keep the affair from her. I may say, in passing, that she is as honest as Howard is the reverse. “He went to Australia, keeping up a fairly regular correspondence with his father, in which he made out that he had seen the wickedness of his ways, and was in honest employment. Of course, at that distance, we had no means of testing his assertions. He and I had never been particularly good friends, and his proved dishonesty had snapped the frail bond between us. We never wrote to each other for years. “And then one day the long silence was broken. I married and went out to China, where I had secured a good post. Our parents had died before he returned to England. The little money my father had accumulated out of a continuous struggle with fortune was left to my sister, as being most in need of it. One day I received a long letter from Howard in which he told me that, having made a little money in Australia, he had determined to come back to the old country, and see what he could do with the small capital he had saved. He had gone in for finance, of course in a very modest way, and he had no reason to complain of his success. “It is perhaps not greatly to my credit when I tell you that I am very hard against evil-doers, offenders against the moral law. I had not forgiven that early transgression, and I would have preferred not to renew relations with my brother. But I reflected that such sentiments were unchristian, and if the man was now walking in the straight path, it was not for me to withhold the hand of fellowship. I answered the letter, and from that day we corresponded more or less regularly.