When Lewisham saw Lagune again he learnt the particulars of Chaffery’s misdeed and the additional fact that the “lady” had also disappeared.  “That’s a good job,” he remarked selfishly.  “There’s no chance of his coming back.”  He spent a moment trying to imagine the “lady”; he realised more vividly than he had ever done before the narrow range of his experience, the bounds of his imagination.  These people also—­with grey hair and truncated honour—­had their emotions I Even it may be glowing!  He came back to facts.  Chaffery had induced Lagune when hypnotised to sign a blank cheque as an “autograph.”  “The strange thing is,” explained Lagune, “it’s doubtful if he’s legally accountable.  The law is so peculiar about hypnotism and I certainly signed the cheque, you know.”

The little man, in spite of his losses, was now almost cheerful again on account of a curious side issue.  “You may say it is coincidence,” he said, “you may call it a fluke, but I prefer to look for some other interpretation!  Consider this.  The amount of my balance is a secret between me and my bankers.  He never had it from me, for I did not know it—­I hadn’t looked at my passbook for months.  But he drew it all in one cheque, within seventeen and sixpence of the total.  And the total was over five hundred pounds!”

He seemed quite bright again as he culminated.

“Within seventeen and sixpence,” he said.  “Now how do you account for that, eh?  Give me a materialistic explanation that will explain away all that.  You can’t.  Neither can I.”

“I think I can,” said Lewisham.

“Well—­what is it?”

Lewisham nodded towards a little drawer of the bureau.  “Don’t you think—­perhaps”—­a little ripple of laughter passed across his mind—­“he had a skeleton key?”

Lagune’s face lingered amusingly in Lewisham’s mind as he returned to Clapham.  But after a time that amusement passed away.  He declined upon the extraordinary fact that Chaffery was his father-in-law, Mrs. Chaffery his mother-in-law, that these two and Ethel constituted his family, his clan, and that grimy graceless house up the Clapham hillside was to be his home.  Home!  His connexion with these things as a point of worldly departure was as inexorable now as though he had been born to it.  And a year ago, except for a fading reminiscence of Ethel, none of these people had existed for him.  The ways of Destiny!  The happenings of the last few months, foreshortened in perspective, seemed to have almost a pantomimic rapidity.  The thing took him suddenly as being laughable; and he laughed.

His laugh marked an epoch.  Never before had Lewisham laughed at any fix in which he had found himself!  The enormous seriousness of adolescence was coming to an end; the days of his growing were numbered.  It was a laugh of infinite admissions.

CHAPTER XXXI.

IN BATTERSEA PARK.