hat dazed by the sentence--but he was also sullen
and morose. I asked him where his wife and two children--one, a mere
infant--were. For I had already been to his private address and
had found that Mrs. Brake had sold all the furniture and
disappeared--completely. No one--thereabouts, at any rate--knew where
she was, or would tell me anything. On my asking this, he refused to
answer. I pressed him--he said finally that he was only speaking the
truth when he replied that he did not know where his wife was. I said I
must find her. He forbade me to make any attempt. Then I begged him
to tell me if she was with friends. I remember very well what he
replied.--'I'm not going to say one word more to any man living,
Mr. Gilwaters,' he answered determinedly. 'I shall be dead to the
world--only because I've been a trusting fool!--for ten years or
thereabouts, but, when I come back to it, I'll let the world see what
revenge means! Go away!' he concluded. 'I won't say one word more.'
And--I left him."

"And--you made no more inquiries?--about the wife?" asked Bryce.

"I did what I could," replied Mr. Gilwaters. "I made some inquiry in
the neighbourhood in which they had lived. All I could discover was
that Mrs. Brake had disappeared under extraordinarily mysterious
circumstances. There was no trace whatever of her. And I speedily found
that things were being said--the usual cruel suspicions, you know."

"Such as--what?" asked Bryce.

"That the amount of the defalcations was much larger than had been
allowed to appear," replied Mr. Gilwaters. "That Brake was a very clever
rogue who had got the money safely planted somewhere abroad, and that
his wife had gone off somewhere--Australia, or Canada, or some other
far-off region--to await his release. Of course, I didn't believe
one word of all that. But there was the fact--she had vanished! And
eventually, I thought of Ransford, as having been Brake's great friend,
so I tried to find him. And then I found that he, too, who up to
that time had been practising in a London suburb--Streatham--had also
disappeared. Just after Brake's arrest, Ransford had suddenly sold his
practice and gone--no one knew where, but it was believed--abroad. I
couldn't trace him, anyway. And soon after that I had a long illness,
and for two or three years was an invalid, and--well, the thing was over
and done with, and, as I said just now, I have never heard anything of
any of them for all these years. And no