Timmins looked scrutinisingly at it.

“Well, I’m sure, sir!  What a forger you would have made!” he said admiringly.  “I would have sworn that was Mr. Mills’s own hand of write.  It’s wonderful, sir.”

Mr. Taynton sighed, and took the paper again.

“Yes, it is like, isn’t it?” he said, “and it’s so easy to do.  Luckily forgers don’t know the way to forge properly.”

“And what might that be, sir?” asked Timmins.

“Why, to throw yourself mentally into the nature of the man whose handwriting you wish to forge.  Of course one has to know the handwriting thoroughly well, but if one does that one just has to visualise it, and then, as I said, project oneself into the other, not laboriously copy the handwriting.  Let’s try another.  Ah, who is that letter from?  Mrs. Assheton isn’t it.  Let me look at the signature just once again.”

Mr. Taynton closed his eyes a moment after looking at it.  Then he took his quill, and wrote quickly.

“You would swear to that, too, would you not, Timmins?” he asked.

“Why, God bless me yes, sir,” said he.  “Swear to it on the book.”

The door opened and as Godfrey Mills came in, Mr. Taynton tweaked the paper out of Timmins’s hand, and tore it up.  It might perhaps seem strange to dear Mills that his partner had been forging his signature, though only in jest.

“’Fraid I’m rather late,” said Mills.

“Not at all, my dear fellow,” said Taynton without the slightest touch of ill-humour.  “How are you?  There’s very little to do; I want your signature to this and this, and your careful perusal of that.  Mrs. Assheton’s letter?  No, that only concerns me; I have dealt with it.”

A quarter of an hour was sufficient, and at the end Timmins carried the papers away leaving the two partners together.  Then, as soon as the door closed, Mills spoke.

“I’ve been thinking over our conversation of last night,” he said, “and there are some points I don’t think you have quite appreciated, which I should like to put before you.”

Something inside Mr. Taynton’s brain, the same watcher perhaps who looked at Morris so closely the evening before, said to him.  “He is going to try it on.”  But it was not the watcher but his normal self that answered.  He beamed gently on his partner.

“My dear fellow, I might have been sure that your quick mind would have seen new aspects, new combinations,” he said.

Mills leaned forward over the table.

“Yes, I have seen new aspects, to adopt your words,” he said, “and I will put them before you.  These financial operations, shall we call them, have been going on for two years now, have they not?  You began by losing a large sum in South Africans—­”

“We began,” corrected Mr. Taynton, gently.  He was looking at the other quite calmly; his face expressed no surprise at all; if there was anything in his expression beyond that of quiet kindness, it was perhaps pity.