"Yes, and he did it so beautifully, sometimes, you could not have known one from the other. The more exactly alike he made them, the more Mr. Leicester was pleased. I used to tell Robert to beat the copy if he could, and some of the names were crabbed enough, but Mr. Leicester said that wasn't the object."
"No, it wasn't the object," muttered Jacob, and now his eyes flashed, for he had obtained the clue.
"One week, I remember," persisted Mrs. Gray, "he wrote and wrote, and all the time on one name. I fairly got tired of the sight of it, and Robert too; but Mr. Leicester said that he would never be a clerk without perfect penmanship."
"And this one name, what was it?" inquired Jacob, with keen interest.
Mrs. Gray opened a stand drawer, and took out a copy-book filled with loose scraps of paper.
Jacob examined the book and the scraps of paper separately and together. Mrs. Gray was wrong when she said it was a single name only. In the book, and on loose fragments were notes of hand, evidently imitated from some genuine original, with checks on various city banks, apparently drawn at random, and merely as a practice in penmanship; but one bank was more frequently mentioned than the others, and this fact Jacob treasured in his mind.
"This name," he said, touching a signature to one of these papers—"whose is it?"
"Why it is the merchant that Robert is with," answered Mrs. Gray. "That is the one he wrote over so often!"
"I thought so," said Jacob, dryly; and laying the copy-book down, he seemed to cast it from his mind.
Mrs. Gray had become unfamiliar with the features of her relative, or she would have seen that deep and stern feelings were busy within him; but now she only thought him anxious and tired out with the excitement of returning home after so many years of absence.