That old Kitely was shrewd--shrewd! He had at once hit on a fact which
those Wilchester folk of thirty years ago had never suspected. It had
been said at the time that the two offenders had lost the building
society's money in gambling and speculation, and there had been grounds
for such a belief. But that was not so. Most of the money had been
skilfully and carefully put where the two conspirators could lay hands
on it as soon as it was wanted, and when the term of imprisonment was
over they had nothing to do but take possession of it for their own
purposes. They had engineered everything very well--Cotherstone's
essentially constructive mind, regarding their doings from the vantage
ground of thirty years' difference, acknowledged that they had been
cute, crafty, and cautious to an admirable degree of perfection. Quietly
and unobtrusively they had completely disappeared from their own
district in the extreme South of England, when their punishment was
over. They had let it get abroad that they were going to another
continent, to retrieve the past and start a new life; it was even known
that they repaired to Liverpool, to take ship for America. But in
Liverpool they had shuffled off everything of the past--names,
relations, antecedents. There was no reason why any one should watch
them out of the country, but they had adopted precautions against such
watching. They separated, disappeared, met again in the far North, in a
sparsely-populated, lonely country of hill and dale, led there by an
advertisement which they had seen in a local newspaper, met with by
sheer chance in a Liverpool hotel. There was an old-established business
to sell as a going concern, in the dale town of Highmarket: the two
ex-convicts bought it. From that time they were Anthony Mallalieu and
Milford Cotherstone, and the past was dead.

During the thirty years in which that past had been dead, Cotherstone
had often heard men remark that this world of ours is a very small one,
and he had secretly laughed at them. To him and to his partner the world
had been wide and big enough. They were now four hundred miles away from
the scene of their crime. There was nothing whatever to bring Wilchester
people into that northern country, nothing to take Highmarket folk
anywhere near Wilchester. Neither he nor Mallalieu ever went far
afield--London they avoided with particular care, lest they should meet
any one there who had known them in the old days. They ha