There is something magnetic in all great emotions: one proof of their reality is that they are magnetic. It is only an actor who can endow an assumed emotion with magnetism. Elsie, the younger girl, fell into a corresponding sympathy of wrath: she was equal to the occasion: passion for passion, she joined him and fed the flame. But--for all persons are not magnetic--the elder sister remained cold. From time to time she wanted to know exactly what Mr. Dering had said: this her brother was too angry to remember: she was pained and puzzled: she neither soothed him nor sympathised with him. Then the mother returned, and the whole story was told again, Elsie assisting. Now, Mrs. Arundel was a woman of great sense: a practical woman: a woman of keen judgment. She prided herself upon the possession of these qualities, which are not supposed to be especially feminine. She heard the story with disturbed face and knitted brow. 'Surely,' she said, 'what you tell me, Athelstan, is beyond belief. Mr. Dering, of all men, to accuse you--you--of such a thing! It is impossible.' 'I wish it was impossible. He accuses me of forging that cheque for 720_l_. He says that while I was working in his office for him, a fortnight ago, I took a certain cheque book out of the safe, forged his writing on a cheque, and returned the cheque book. This is what he says. Do you call that accusing, or don't you?' 'Certainly. If he says that. But how can he--Mr. Dering--the most exact and careful of men? I will drive to Lincoln's Inn at once and find out. My dear boy, pray calm yourself. There is--there must be--some terrible mistake.' She went immediately; and she had a long interview with the solicitor. Mr. Dering was evidently much disturbed by what had happened. He did not receive her as he usually received his clients, sitting in his arm-chair. He pushed back the chair and stood up, leaning a hand on the back of it, a tall, thin, erect figure, gray-haired, austere of face. There was little to reassure the mother in that face. The very trouble of it made her heart sink. 'I certainly have not accused Athelstan,' he said. 'It is, however, quite true that there has been a robbery here, and that of a large sum of money--no less than 720_l_.' 'But what has that to do with my boy?' 'We have made a few preliminary inquiries. I will do for you, Mrs. Arundel, what I did for your son, and you shall yourself understand what connection those inquiries have with him.' He proceeded coldly and without comment to set forth the case so far as he had got at the facts. As he went on, the mother's heart became as heavy as lead. Before he finished, she was certain. There is, you see, a way of presenting a case without comment which is more efficacious than any amount of talk; and Mrs. Arundel plainly perceived--which was indeed the case--that the lawyer had by this time little doubt in his own mind that her son had done this thing.