on
your own responsibility. You don't choose to answer? Now, the story is
that these men have been blackmailing you. Assuming that story to be
true, they have been paid, and it is evident that there must be some
means of discovering the channel through which payments have been made.
Are you prepared to submit to an examination of your books?'

'I am,' said John Jervase, 'willingly, at any moment.'

'You!' cried James.

'And not you?' said the General. 'Well, that simplifies matters.'

The wretched James had all but surrendered himself to fate a quarter of
an hour before, and now, seeing that he had betrayed himself, he cast
the case up altogether, and, throwing both arms upon the table, fell
on his knees beside it, dropped his face upon his hands, and began to
whimper.

'Wait a bit, sir,' cried John Jervase. 'Now just wait one minute and
I'll put the case before you. Here are the facts. I should be obliged
if you would take a seat, sir, and allow me to do the same.' He moved
a chair towards the table with great deliberation, sat down leisurely,
reached out for the decanter, filled his glass, emptied it and set it
down--all with a certain look of weighty purpose. 'I'm going to make a
clean breast of it, sir. I should leave James to do it if he was capable
of doing anything but whimper like a kicked charity boy. It's a bit to
my discredit to speak the plain truth, because I've got to admit that I
have certainly made an effort to deceive you. That isn't creditable, and
it goes again the grain to admit it. I said I didn't know this fellow
Lightfoot. That was a lie. I know him well. I told the lie to shelter
James.'

James lifted a beslobbered face, stared at the speaker for a single
instant, and then allowed his head to fall upon his hands again.

'I did it to shelter James,' Jervase repeated, and as he spoke he dealt
his cousin a sharp kick beneath the table, as if to bespeak that worthy
gentleman's particular attention. 'James, to tell the truth about him,
since it must be told, has always had two sides to him. He was a solid
chapel-goer till he was thirty, and he was a deacon or an elder, or
something of that sort; but he always had some little game on on the
sly, and he always succeeded in keeping his Piccadillies pretty quiet.
When he began to make money, he went over to the Church and took the
plate round at collecting time, and got to be a sidesman, and a trustee,
and I don't know what all. He never married,