and this man took them all off his hands.  There was a matter about the glass that Edward was bent on ascertaining, and he went to study the manufacture in Bohemia, taking his wife with him, and leaving Rose with us.  Shortly after, Dr. Long and Harry Beauchamp received letters asking for a considerable advance, to be laid out on the materials that this improvement would require.  Immediately afterwards came the crash.”

“Exactly what I heard.  Of course the letters were written in ignorance of what was impending.”

“Colin, they were never written at all by Edward!  He denied all knowledge of them.  Alison saw Dr. Long’s, most ingeniously managed—­ foreign paper and all—­but she could swear to the forgery—­”

“You suspect this Maddox?”

“Most strongly!  He knew the state of the business; Edward did not.  And he had a correspondence that would have enabled so ingenious a person easily to imitate Edward’s letters.  I do not wonder at their having been taken in; but how Julia—­how Harry Beauchamp could believe—­what they do believe.  Oh, Colin! it will not do to think about it!”

“Oh, that I had been at home!  Were no measures taken?”

“Alas! alas! we urged Edward to come home and clear himself; but that poor little wife of his was terrified beyond measure, imagined prisons and trials.  She was unable to move, and he could not leave her; she took from him an unhappy promise not to put himself in what she fancied danger from the law, and then died, leaving him a baby that did not live a day.  He was too broken-hearted to care for vindicating himself, and no one-no one would do it for him!”

Colonel Keith frowned and clenched the hand that lay in his grasp till it was absolute pain, but pain that was a relief to feel.  “Madness, madness!” he said.  “Miserable!  But how was it at home—?  Did this Maddox stand his ground?”

“Yes, if he had fled, all would have been clear, but he doctored the accounts his own way, and quite satisfied Dr. Long and Harry.  He showed Edward’s receipt for the £6000 that had been advanced, and besides, there was a large sum not accounted for, which was, of course, supposed to have been invested abroad by Edward—­some said gambled away—­as if he had not had a regular hatred of all sorts of games.”

“Edward with his head in the clouds!  One notion is as likely as the other.—­Then absolutely nothing was done!”

“Nothing!  The bankruptcy was declared, the whole affair broken up; and certainly if every one had not known Edward to be the most heedless of men, the confusion would have justified them in thinking him a dishonest one.  Things had been done in his name by Maddox that might have made a stranger think him guilty of the rest, but to those who had ever known his abstraction, and far more his real honour and uprightness, nothing could have been plainer.”

“It all turned upon his absence.”