"What _do_ you mean?" I queried, with as much lofty scorn as I could command. "I mean," he replied, "that all Felix Shap's documents were forgeries." "Forgeries?" I exclaimed. "Yes, spurious! False affidavits! Forgeries, the lot of 'em. My belief is that Stonebridge began to suspect this himself, and I think he has had a narrow escape of being murdered outright by those two rascals. As it is, they have destroyed every proof of their villainy, and old Stonebridge, I imagine, is content to let things remain as they are rather than admit publicly that he was completely taken in by two very plausible rogues." "But," I urged, "what about the handwriting expert?" The funny creature laughed aloud. "Yes!" he said, "what about the expert? If there had been two they would have disagreed. And mind you at a distance of twelve years a signature would be difficult of absolute identification. Every one's handwriting undergoes certain modifications in the course of years. Experts," he reiterated. "Bah!" "But," I went on, impatiently, "I don't see the object of the whole scheme." "The object was blackmail," the whimsical creature retorted, "and it has succeeded admirably. Already we read that Messrs. Shap and Lloyd are staying at expensive hotels in London, that they have granted interviews to pressmen and written articles for half-penny newspapers. We shall hear of them as cinema stars presently. They have had the most gorgeous, the most paying publicity, and presently Sir David Carysfort will have had enough of them and will put a few more hundreds in their pockets just to be rid of them. That was the object of the whole scheme, my dear young lady! And see how well it was carried out. "Of course the fuddle-headed Dutchman never thought of it. I imagine that the whole scheme originated in the fertile brain of Mr. Julian Lloyd. And it was thoroughly well thought out from the manufacture of the documents and letters down to the assault on the silly old country attorney. And, mind you, the rascals originally went to a silly country attorney; they would have been afraid to go to a London lawyer, lest he be too sharp for them. "The only mistake they made were the letters purported to be written to Berta Shap by the husband who is supposed to have disappeared, and the copy of Berta's marriage certificate. It is those letters that gave me the clue to the whole thing; old Stonebridge was too dull to have seen through those letters. If they were genuine why should Felix Shap have brought them over to England? They had nothing whatever to do with any contract about the Shap Fuelettes. If they were genuine, how could he guess that he would have to disprove a story of a secret marriage and of young Alfred being the son of Sir Alfred Carysfort? By wanting to prove too much, he, to my mind, gave himself away, and one can but marvel that neither lawyers nor police saw through the roguery.