‘What have you done with my papers?’ cried John, trembling with hurry and rage, yet subdued, he could not tell how. ‘I’ll tell you,’ said the other. ‘I’ll tell you everything. Take me somewhere and let me tell you.’ The young man laid his hand upon the old man’s arm, and led him back, feeling somehow his heart melt towards the unresistant sinner. Montressor stood at the door watching this pursuit and capture. He waited for them as they came forward, his face expressing a sort of stupefication of wonder. John only remembered the spectator when he reached the door with his prisoner, and found this startled countenance confronting him. ‘Why, May!’ cried he, turning from one to another. ‘Why, May!’ CHAPTER V. THE CULPRIT. John’s amanuensis, whom he had so rashly trusted, had carried away his copy of John’s scheme with, in reality, little or no idea of cheating, and none at all of injuring John. His faculties were confused by long courses of meditative sophistry, such as had been his amusement in the years when he had no other, and by the criminal atmosphere in which he had lived, in which the deception or spoiling of your neighbour was the most natural matter, the best sign of talent and originality, at once the excitement and the amusement of the perverted mind. The man who called himself March had a more than usual share of that confusion which so often accompanies breaches of the moral law. He had gone through far more than usual of those mental exercises by which all but the most stupid and degraded attempt to prove themselves right, or at least not so far wrong, in those offences which to the rest of the world are beyond excuse. And his mental ingenuity was such that he could make a wonderful plea to himself in favour of any course which fancy or temptation suggested. In the present case the effort had not been at all a difficult one. He had really meant no harm to John. He intended, in fact, to recommend John warmly, to put a good thing in his way. In all probability the young man would not prove a good advocate for himself. He might be shy of pushing his own interests: most inventors were shy and retiring, easily discouraged: and what he meant to secure would not in reality be more than a percentage on the trouble he would take in recommending John. A percentage--that was what in reality it would be--and well earned: for had he not been at the trouble of copying, and indeed adding something of his own to the young man’s dry plans and calculations, besides the service he would do him in carrying his goods as it were to market and securing a sale for them, and a profitable job for their inventor. Nothing could be more self-evident than this. At the end he came to be quite sure that he was doing his young benefactor a real service, and that nothing in his conduct wanted excusing at all.