Later in the evening he disclosed, perfunctorily, the matter which had been a serious weight on his mind when he entered the house, but which this revelation of vast wealth had diminished to a trifle. Titus Price had been the treasurer of the building fund which the bazaar was designed to assist. Mynors had assumed the position of the dead man, and that day, in going through the accounts, he had discovered that a sum of fifty pounds was missing.
'It's a dreadful thing for Willie, if it gets about,' he said; 'a tale of that sort would follow him to Australia.'
'Oh, Henry, it is!' she exclaimed, sorrow-stricken, 'but we mustn't let it get about. Let us pay the money ourselves. You must enter it in the books and say nothing.'
'That is impossible,' he said firmly. 'I can't alter the accounts. At least I can't alter the bank-book and the vouchers. The auditor would detect it in a minute. Besides, I should not be doing my duty if I kept a thing like this from the Superintendent-minister. He, at any rate, must know, and perhaps the stewards.'
'But you can urge them to say nothing. Tell them that you will make it good. I will write a cheque at once.'
'I had meant to find the fifty myself,' he said. It was a peddling sum to him now.
'Let me pay half, then,' she asked.
'If you like,' he urged, smiling faintly at her eagerness. 'The thing is bound to be kept quiet—it would create such a frightful scandal. Poor old chap!' he added, carelessly, 'I suppose he was hard run, and meant to put it back—as they all do mean.'
But it was useless for Mynors to affect depression of spirits, or mournful sympathy with the errors of a dead sinner. The fifty thousand danced a jig in his brain that night.
Anna was absorbed in contemplating the misfortune of Willie Price. She prayed wildly that he might never learn the full depth of his father's fall. The miserable robbery of Sarah's wages was buried for evermore, and this new delinquency, which all would regard as flagrant sacrilege, must be buried also. A soul less loyal than Anna's might have feared that Willie, a self-convicted forger, had been a party to the embezzlement; but Anna knew that it could not be so.