hen the voices came so near that she could hear what they were saying.
They were coming amicably together to her favourite retreat.

"It's a very queer thing," said Phil, "if it is as they think, that
somebody went there the night before last and cleared off the books.
Well, not all the books, some that are supposed to contain the secret
transactions. Deucedly cleverly done it must have been, if it was done
at all, for nobody saw the fellow, or fellows, if there were more than
one----"

"Why do you doubt?" said Mrs. Dennistoun. "Is there any way of
accounting for it otherwise?"

"Oh, a very good way--that Brown, the manager, simply took them with
him, as he would naturally do, if he wasn't a fool. Why should he go off
and leave papers that would convict him, for the pleasure of involving
other fellows, and ruining them too?"

"Are there others, then, involved with him?" Oh, how calm, how
inconceivably calm, was Mrs. Dennistoun's voice! Had she been asking the
gardener about the slugs that eat the young plants it would have been
more disturbed.

"Well, Stanfield seemed to think so. He's a sort of head clerk, a fellow
enormously trusted. I shouldn't wonder if he was at the bottom of it
himself, they're so sure of him," said Phil, with a laugh. "He says
there's a kind of suspicion of two or three. Clumsy wretches they must
be if they let themselves be found out like that. But I don't believe
it. I believe Brown's alone in it, and that it's him that's taken
everything away. I believe it's far the safest way in those kind of
dodges to be alone. You get all the swag, and you're in no danger of
being rounded on, don't you know--till you find things are getting too
hot, and you cut away."

"I don't understand the words you use, but I think I know what you
mean," said Mrs. Dennistoun. "How dreadful it is to think that in
business, where honesty is the very first principle, there should be
such terrible plots and plans as those!"

"'Tis awful, isn't it?" said Phil, with a laugh that seemed to ring all
down the combe, and came back in echoes from the opposite slope, where
in the distance the cab from the station was seen hastening back towards
the railway in a cloud of dust. The laugh was like a trumpet of triumph
flung across the distance at the discomfited enemy thus going off
drooping in the hurry of defeat. He added, "But you may imagine, even if
I had known anything, he wouldn't have got much out of me. I didn't know