‘If there is fraud here,’ he said to himself, ‘this girl has nothing to do with it.’ The behaviour of Mr. Erin had also impressed him favourably; with that of William Henry he was not so satisfied, it seemed to him to have too much _sang-froid_; but then (as he frankly confessed to himself) he had been prejudiced against him. Mr. Wallis was a man accustomed to ‘thread the labyrinth of the mind’ in matters more important, or at all events more serious, than literary investigation, and had a very observant eye, and the conclusion he came to was that, if there was one person in the present company more guilty than another as regards the Shakespearean fabrications (as Malone had called them), it was Mr. Frank Dennis. He had not indeed uttered one word; but when the girl had approached the safe there had been unmistakable signs of trouble in his face, while at this moment, when, as he (Mr. Wallis) knew, and as the other must needs suspect, a damning proof of the worthlessness of one of these vaunted discoveries was about to be produced, he exhibited an anxiety and apprehension which, to do them justice, were absent from the rest. ‘This is a mortgage deed executed by John Hemynge,’ observed Mr. Wallis, drawing a document from his pocket, ‘concerning the genuineness of which there is no dispute. It was found among the papers of the Featherstonehaugh family, to whom the nation is indebted (through my late client, David Garrick) for the Shakespeare mortgage now in the British Museum. If the signature of yonder deed tallies with it, well and good; I shall, believe me, be pleased to find it so; but if it does not do so, there can be no question as to which is the spurious one.’ He threw the mortgage on the table, and stood with an air, if not of indifference, of one who has no personal concern in the matter on hand, while Mr. Erin compared the two signatures with minuteness. Presently he beckoned to his son in an agitated manner: ‘Your eyes are better than mine,’ he said: ‘what do you make of this?’ William Henry just glanced at the two documents in a perfunctory manner, as though he had been asked to witness some signature of a client of his employer, and quietly answered: ‘They are very dissimilar; whichever is the wrong one, it can hardly be called an imitation, for it has not a letter in common with the other.’ ‘There is no question, young man, as to which is the wrong one,’ remarked Mr. Wallis, severely; ‘and as to imitation, it is clear enough that such a deception, however clumsily, has been seriously attempted. The only doubt we have to clear up is, “Who is the forger?”’ Mr. Wallis’s glance flashed for an instant upon Frank Dennis. He was standing apart, with his hand over the lower part of his features, and his eyes fixed on the ground. He looked like one upon whom a blow, long expected, has at last fallen.