II.

John Dwerrihouse had absconded three months ago,—­and I had seen him only a few hours back.  John Dwerrihouse had embezzled seventy-five thousand pounds of the company’s money, yet told me that he carried that sum upon his person.  Were ever facts so strangely incongruous, so difficult to reconcile?  How should he have ventured again into the light of day?  How dared he show himself along the line?  Above all, what had he been doing throughout those mysterious three months of disappearance?

Perplexing questions these.  Questions which at once suggested themselves to the minds of all concerned, but which admitted of no easy solution.  I could find no reply to them.  Captain Prendergast had not even a suggestion to offer.  Jonathan Jelf, who seized the first opportunity of drawing me aside and learning all that I had to tell, was more amazed and bewildered than either of us.  He came to my room that night, when all the guests were gone, and we talked the thing over from every point of view; without, it must be confessed, arriving at any kind of conclusion.

“I do not ask you,” he said, “whether you can have mistaken your man.  That is impossible.”

“As impossible as that I should mistake some stranger for yourself.”

“It is not a question of looks or voice, but of facts.  That he should have alluded to the fire in the blue room is proof enough of John Dwerrihouse’s identity.  How did he look?”

“Older, I thought.  Considerably older, paler, and more anxious.”

“He has had enough to make him look anxious, anyhow,” said my friend, gloomily; “be he innocent or guilty.”

“I am inclined to believe that he is innocent,” I replied.  “He showed no embarrassment when I addressed him, and no uneasiness when the guard came round.  His conversation was open to a fault.  I might almost say that he talked too freely of the business which he had in hand.”

“That again is strange; for I know no one more reticent on such subjects.  He actually told you that he had the seventy-five thousand pounds in his pocket?”

“He did.”

“Humph!  My wife has an idea about it, and she may be right—­”

“What idea?”

“Well, she fancies,—­women are so clever, you know, at putting themselves inside people’s motives,—­she fancies that he was tempted; that he did actually take the money; and that he has been concealing himself these three months in some wild part of the country,—­struggling possibly with his conscience all the time, and daring neither to abscond with his booty nor to come back and restore it.”

“But now that he has come back?”

“That is the point.  She conceives that he has probably thrown himself upon the company’s mercy; made restitution of the money; and, being forgiven, is permitted to carry the business through as if nothing whatever had happened.”