the open window lifted the loose sheet of paper I had been scribbling on and landed it, the other side up, on the carpet.  As I stooped for it I saw figures on it, and feeling sure that they had been scrawled there by Mr. Orr in his attempt to make the pen write, I pulled out the memorandum again and compared the two minutely.  They were the work of the same hand, but the figures on the stray leaf differed from those in the memorandum in a very important particular.  Those in the memorandum began with a 2, while those on the stray sheet began with a 7—­a striking difference.  Look, Agatha, here is the piece of paper just as I found it.  You see here, there, and everywhere the one set of figures, 7753.67.  Here it is hardly legible, here it is blotted with too much ink, here it is faint but sufficiently distinct, and here—­well, there can be no mistake about these figures, 7753.67; yet the memorandum reads, $2753.67, and the money returned to me amounts to $2753.67—­a clean five thousand dollars’ difference.”

Here, James, my father paused, perhaps to give me a commiserating look, though I did not need it; perhaps to give himself a moment in which to regain courage for what he still had to say.  I did not break the silence; I was too sure of your integrity; besides, my tongue could not have moved if it would; all my faculties seemed frozen except that instinct which cried out continually within me:  “No! there is no fault in James.  He has done no wrong.  No one but himself shall ever convince me that he has robbed anyone of anything except poor me of my poor heart.”  But inner cries of this kind are inaudible and after a moment’s interval my father went on: 

“Five thousand dollars is no petty sum, and the discrepancy in the two sets of figures which seemed to involve me in so considerable a loss set me thinking.  Convinced that Mr. Orr would not be likely to scribble one number over so many times if it was not the one then in his mind, I went to Mr. Forsyth’s office and borrowed a magnifying-glass, through which I again subjected the figures in the memorandum to a rigid scrutiny.  The result was a positive conviction that they had been tampered with after their first writing, either by Mr. Orr himself or by another whom I need not name.  The 2 had originally been a 7, and I could even see where the top line of the 7 had been given a curl and where a horizontal stroke had been added at the bottom.

“Agatha, I came home as troubled a man as there was in all these parts.  I remembered the suppressed excitement which had been in James Zabel’s face when he handed me over the money, and I remembered also that you loved him, or thought you did, and that, love or no love, you were pledged to marry him.  If I had not recalled all this I might have proceeded more warily.  As it was, I took the bold and open course and gave James Zabel an opportunity to explain himself.  Agatha, he did not embrace it.  He listened to my accusations and followed my finger