Then came the temptation of Mrs. Poynsett’s cheque, suggested, perhaps in jest, by Vivian, but growing on them as the feasibility of using it became clear.  It was so easy to make it appear to Archie Douglas that the letter was simply an inquiry for the lost one.  Mr. Proudfoot, the father, was out of reach; Mrs. Poynsett would continue to think the cheque lost in the post; and Tom Vivian undertook to get it presented for payment through persons who would guard against its being tracked.  The sum exceeded the debt, but he would return the overplus to them, and they both cherished the hope of returning it with interest.  Indeed, it had been but a half consent on the part of either, elicited only by the dire alternative of exposure; the envelope and letter were destroyed, and Vivian carried off the cheque to some of the Jews with whom he had had only too many transactions, and they never met him again.

Moy’s part all along had been half cowardice, half ambition.  The sense of that act and of its consequences had gnawed at his heart through all his success; but to cast himself down from his position as partner and son-in-law of Mr. Proudfoot, the keen, clever, trusted, confidential agent of half the families around—­to let his wife know his shame and that of her brother, and to degrade his daughter into the daughter of a felon—­was more than he could bear; and he had gone on trying to drown the sense of that one lapse in the prosperity of his career and his efforts to place his daughter in the first ranks of society.  No doubt the having done an injury to the Poynsett family had been the true secret of that enmity, more than political, which he had always shown to Raymond; and after thinking Gadley safer out of that office, and having yielded to his solicitations and set him up at the Three Pigeons, he had been almost compelled to bid for popularity by using his position as a magistrate to protect the blackguardism of the town.  He had been meant for better things, and had been dragged on against his conscience and judgment by the exigencies of his unhappy secret; and when the daughter, for whose sake he had sacrificed his better self, had only been led by her position into the follies and extravagances of the worst part of the society into which she had been introduced, and threw herself into the hands of a dissipated gambler, to whom her fortune made her a desirable prey—­truly his sin had found him out.

His fight at first had been partly force of habit, but he was so entirely crushed that they could only have pity on him when he put himself so entirely in their hands, only begging for forbearance to his wife and her aged father, and entreating that principal, interest, and compound interest might at once be tendered to Mrs. Poynsett.

The brothers could answer for nothing.  Archie must decide for himself what he would accept as restoration of his character, and Mrs. Poynsett could alone answer as to whether she would accept the compensation.  But neither of them could be hard on one so stricken and sorrowful, and they did not expect hardness from their mother and cousin, especially so far as old Mr. Proudfoot and his daughter were concerned.