"A true one!" Mr. Bundercombe continued.
"Now listen! The total amount in possession of your two confederates when you went into prison was under a thousand pounds. You heard from them periodically as struggling paupers. Harding met you out of prison. He was almost in rags. They were at the end of their resources, he told you. He gave you a hundred pounds, to procure which, he assured you with tears in his eyes, they had almost beggared themselves. It was to enable you to leave the country and make a fresh start.
"You were even grateful. You shook him by the hand. You left him at the hotel at Southampton only an hour before you got my telegram."
"What of it?" Stanley asked.
"Nothing, except this," Mr. Bundercombe concluded: "Your two partners were so scared at the result of the Hammersmith affair and at your sentence that they turned over a new leaf. They went into business as outside stockbrokers—with your capital. The agreement as to a third profits was still in force. They had what I can describe only as the devil's own luck. I should say their total capital to-day is at least fifty thousand pounds.
"The time came for you to be released. They had no idea of parting with a third of their money and taking you into the business. All the time they had deceived you. They continued the deception. Harding met you as a poor man. But for me you would have been on your way to South Africa by this time, with a hundred pounds in your pocket."
"Is what you are telling me the truth?" Stanley demanded.
"Absolutely!" Mr. Bundercombe declared. "I stumbled across the truth in making inquiries concerning you and your probable future. I had meant, as a matter of fact, to put up a little money of my own to give you a fresh start. In the course of these inquiries I happened to run across a young woman who had been a typist in Harding's office. It was from her I learned the truth. As he rose in the world Harding seems to have treated the girl badly. A little kindness and a little attention on my part, and I learned the truth. She placed me in possession of the whole story after we had lunched together to-day."
Stanley at last took the chair he had so long refused. He sat with his arms folded.
"And I kept my mouth closed!" he muttered. "It was their job. I would no more have pulled the trigger of my revolver than I would have shot myself —if I had known. It was they who put the cartridges there!"