“Why not?” said Monckton.  “I have nothing to conceal.  However, all I can tell you at present is that I am going to Hull to try and find a couple of rogues.”

To Hull he went, breathing avarice and vengeance.  This dangerous villain was quite master of Bartley’s secret, and Hope’s.  To be sure, when Hope first discovered him in Bartley’s office, he was puzzled at the sudden interference of that stranger.  He had only seen Hope’s back until this, and, moreover, Hope had been shabbily dressed in black cloth hard worn, whereas he was in a new suit of tweed when he exposed Monckton’s villainy.  But this was explained at the trial, and Monckton instructed his attorney to cross-examine Hope about his own great fraud; but counsel refused to do so, either because he disbelieved his client, or thought such a cross-examination would be stopped, or set the court still more against his client.

Monckton raged at this, and, of course, said he had been bought by the other side.  But now he was delighted that his enemies’ secret had never been inquired into, and that he could fall on them both like a thunder-bolt.

He was at Hull next day, and rambled about the old shop, and looked in at the windows.  All new faces, and on the door-plate, “Atkinson & Co.”

Then he went in, and asked for Mr. Bartley.

Name not known.

“Why, he used to be here.  I was in his employ.”

No; nobody knew Mr. Bartley.

Could he see Mr. Atkinson?

Certainly.  Mr. Atkinson would be there at two o’clock.

Monckton, after some preamble, asked whether he had not succeeded in this business to Mr. Robert Bartley.

No.  He had bought the business from Mrs. Duplex, a widow residing in this town, and he happened to know that her husband had taken it from Whitaker, a merchant at Boston.

“Is he alive, sir?”

“I believe so, and very well known.”

Monckton went off to Whitaker, and learned from him that he had bought the business from Bartley, but it was many years ago, and he had never heard of the purchaser since that day.

Monckton returned to London baffled.  What was he to do?  Go to a secret-inquiry office?  Advertise that if Mr. Robert Bartley, late of Hull, would write to a certain agent, he would hear of something to his advantage?  He did not much fancy either of these plans.  He wanted to pounce on Bartley, or Hope, or both.

Then he argued thus:  “Bartley has got lots of money now, or he would not have given up business.  Ten to one he lives in London, or visits it.  I will try the Park.”

Well, he did try the Park, both at the riding hour and the driving hour.  He saw no Bartley at either time.

But one day in the Lady’s Mile, as he listlessly watched the carriages defile slowly past him, with every now and then a jam, there crawled past him a smart victoria, and in it a beautiful woman with glorious dark eyes, and a lovely little boy, the very image of her.  It was his wife and her son.