"It was a forgery."
"But I have seen it."
"I can't help that."
"I thought it might be a forgery until I came to examine it," admitted Harry.
"It was one. You can only have examined the first page."
"What do you mean?"
"It was genuine; the next was not. The letter was written on both sides of half a sheet, and the other half torn off. If you could get hold of it I would show you in a minute."
"You shall show me!" cried Harry Ringrose. "If you prove what you say——"
He checked himself with a gesture of misery and bewilderment. What was he to do if the man proved what he said? What would it be his duty to do?
He knew where his mother kept the letters she most prized, the ones that he had himself written her from Africa, and this last letter from her husband. He went into her room and broke open her desk without compunction. It was no time for nice scruples on so vital a point. And yet when he returned to the other room, and found Scrafton smacking his lips over the tumbler that he had filled and almost drained in those few moments, it seemed a sacrilege to let such eyes see such a letter. Instinctively he drew back from those outstretched unclean talons; but Scrafton only burst into hoarse laughter.