‘What a Quixotic fellow!’ said Beattie to himself, as he sat in his own room half an hour later, and opened a certain drawer in his writing-table. ‘To give up two hundred and fifty thousand pounds for a mere freak! I suppose if his uncle’s will had said that the money was to have been thrown into the sea he would have thought it his duty to do it. That was practically what the old man wanted to do. If only the young fool would have taken my hint, and said his uncle told him he had changed his mind, and he was to make the Free Kirk bequest five thousand only, we should have been perfectly safe, with, perhaps, the help of a neat imitation of the old man’s initials on the alteration in the draft. ‘But he wouldn’t rise to it. Some men are like that. Curious. Well; I very much fear our friend may suffer for it. I’m very sorry; but, after all, he has only his own obstinacy to thank for it.’ ‘I may as well get rid of this,’ he continued, taking the draft in his hands. ‘No use producing it in court altered, if the prisoner persists that he never was told to alter it, and never did alter it. That seems tolerably plain. If I thought he might change his mind----’ Beattie was holding one corner of the document with his left hand, and the other with his right, and he paused an instant. ‘No; no chance of that, what he says he will stick to; I am certain of it.’ And at this point in his soliloquy, Mr. Beattie tore the draft in two, and quietly burned it to ashes. CHAPTER XXVIII. TROUBLE DRAWS NEAR. It may easily be believed that Alec Lindsay passed a sleepless night after his visitor left him. In the early morning he sent for a cab, and drove through a choking fog to Theobald’s Road. An old woman, sweeping out the rooms and lighting the fires, was the only person in the office. Alec ran to his own room, and with feverish haste began opening drawers, and tossing about their contents, turning over bundles of old drafts, and peering behind the rows of books on the bookshelves. The draft he sought for was nowhere to be found. Then he began a more systematic search, going carefully over the whole ground again. Of course it was all in vain. By this time the clerks had begun to arrive. He went downstairs, searched the desk which had formerly been occupied by MacGowan, and closely questioned all the clerks, only to learn that none of them had seen the paper he was seeking.