retired from
business, and wanted a quiet place wherein to spend the rest of his
days. He had taken the cottage, and given his landlord satisfactory
references as to his ability to pay the rent--and Cotherstone, always a
busy man, had thought no more about him. Certainly he had never
anticipated such an announcement as that which Kitely had just made to
him--never dreamed that Kitely had recognized him and Mallalieu as men
he had known thirty years ago.

It had been Cotherstone's life-long endeavour to forget all about the
event of thirty years ago, and to a large extent he had succeeded in
dulling his memory. But Kitely had brought it all back--and now
everything was fresh to him. His brows knitted and his face grew dark as
he thought of one thing in his past of which Kitely had spoken so easily
and glibly--the dock. He saw himself in that dock again--and Mallalieu
standing by him. They were not called Mallalieu and Cotherstone then, of
course. He remembered what their real names were--he remembered, too,
that, until a few minutes before, he had certainly not repeated them,
even to himself, for many a long year. Oh, yes--he remembered
everything--he saw it all again. The case had excited plenty of
attention in Wilchester at the time--Wilchester, that for thirty years
had been so far away in thought and in actual distance that it might
have been some place in the Antipodes. It was not a nice case--even now,
looking back upon it from his present standpoint, it made him blush to
think of. Two better-class young working-men, charged with embezzling
the funds of a building society to which they had acted as treasurer and
secretary!--a bad case. The Court had thought it a bad case, and the
culprits had been sentenced to two years' imprisonment. And now
Cotherstone only remembered that imprisonment as one remembers a
particularly bad dream. Yes--it had been real.

His eyes, moody and brooding, suddenly shifted their gaze from the easy
chair to his own hands--they were shaking. Mechanically he took up the
whisky decanter from his desk, and poured some of its contents into his
glass--the rim of the glass tinkled against the neck of the decanter.
Yes--that had been a shock, right enough, he muttered to himself, and
not all the whisky in the world would drive it out of him. But a
drink--neat and stiff--would pull his nerves up to pitch, and so he
drank, once, twice, and sat down with the glass in his hand--to think
still more.