I beg."

Mr. Halfpenny's private room was an apartment of considerable size,
having in it two large recessed windows. Into one of these Mr. Tertius
led Peggie, and there he spoke a few quiet words to her. Barthorpe
Herapath affected to take no notice, but the other men, watching them
closely, saw the girl start at something which Mr. Tertius said. But she
instantly regained her self-possession and composure, and when she came
back to the table her face, though pale, was firm and resolute. And
Barthorpe looked at her then, and his voice, when he spoke again, was
less aggressive and more civil.

"It's not to my taste to bring unpleasant family scandals into public
notice," he said, "and that's why I rather welcomed your proposal that
we should discuss this affair in private, Mr. Halfpenny. And now for
what I've got to tell you. I shall have to go back a long way in our
family history. My late uncle, Jacob Herapath, was the eldest of the
three children of his father, Matthew Herapath, who was a medical
practitioner at Granchester in Yorkshire--a small town on the Yorkshire
and Lancashire border. The three children were Jacob, Richard, and
Susan. With the main outlines of Jacob Herapath's career I believe we
are all fairly well acquainted. He came to London as a youth, and he
prospered, and became what we know him to have been. Richard, my father,
went out to Canada, when he was very young, settled there, and there he
died.

"Now we come to Susan, the only daughter. Susan Herapath, at the age of
twenty, married a man named Wynne--Arthur John Wynne, who at that time
was about twenty-five years of age, was the secretary and treasurer of a
recently formed railway--a sort of branch railway on the coast, which
had its head office at Southampton, a coast town. In Southampton, this
Arthur John Wynne and his wife settled down. At the end of a year their
first child was born--my cousin Margaret, who is here with us. When
she--I am putting all this as briefly as I can--when she was about
eighteen months old a sad affair happened. Wynne, who had been living in
a style very much above his position, was suddenly arrested on a charge
of forgery. Investigations proved that he had executed a number of most
skilful and clever forgeries, by which he had defrauded his employers of
a large--a very large--amount of money. He was sent for trial to the
assizes at Lancaster, he was found guilty, and he was sentenced to seven
years' penal servit