"It's a lie," said he. "He wrote to my mother from Dieppe." "Show me the letter." "I can't; and wouldn't if I could." "It was a forgery." "But I have seen it." "I can't help that." "I thought it might be a forgery until I came to examine it," admitted Harry. "It was one. You can only have examined the first page." "What do you mean?" "It was genuine; the next was not. The letter was written on both sides of half a sheet, and the other half torn off. If you could get hold of it I would show you in a minute." "You shall show me!" cried Harry Ringrose. "If you prove what you say----" He checked himself with a gesture of misery and bewilderment. What was he to do if the man proved what he said? What would it be his duty to do? He knew where his mother kept the letters she most prized, the ones that he had himself written her from Africa, and this last letter from her husband. He went into her room and broke open her desk without compunction. It was no time for nice scruples on so vital a point. And yet when he returned to the other room, and found Scrafton smacking his lips over the tumbler that he had filled and almost drained in those few moments, it seemed a sacrilege to let such eyes see such a letter. Instinctively he drew back from those outstretched unclean talons; but Scrafton only burst into hoarse laughter. "Don't I tell you it's more than half a forgery?" cried he. "Oh, keep it yourself, by all manner of means. I've seen it before, thank you. But it's waste of time looking at the front page; that's genuine, I tell you; turn over and try the other." "I believe that's genuine too." "Then you'd believe anything. Why, it's written in different ink, to begin with. Hold it to the light and you'll see." Harry did so; and the ink on both sides looked black at first sight; but closer inspection revealed a subtle difference. "It was begun in blue-black ink," gasped Harry, "and finished in some other kind." "Exactly." "But the pen seems to have been the same." "It was the gold pen your father used to carry about with him in his waistcoat pocket. But it seems he felt hot when he returned to the berth, after writing this letter in the saloon, for I found his waistcoat hanging on one of the hooks, and the pen was in the pocket." "You say 'after writing this letter.'" "I meant the first page of it. The second is a forgery. Look again at both, and you will see that whereas there is a kind of regular irregularity about the first page, due to the motion of the boat, the irregularity of the second is a sham. It was the most difficult part to imitate." Harry could see that it was so; but at these last words he looked up suddenly from the letter. "You speak as though you had committed the forgery yourself," said he.