"Your distracted husband."
(forgery)
"be forgotten altogether, going with other men's money! I know that it is a mad as well as a wicked thing to do. I do not think I should have done such a wild thing in my sane senses, but I am altogether beside myself. I am not mad, but I am near to madness.
"Good-bye for ever. You will never see me again. Forgive me whether I live or die; and let our boy profit by my example and my end. I can say no more. My brain is on fire. God bless you! God bless you!
"Your distracted husband."
The devilish ingenuity of the fraud was not lost upon the reader. Hardly a word, hardly a phrase was used in the forgery for which there was not a definite model in the original, and the imitation was no less miraculous as a whole than when taken word by word. The very incoherence of the letter was one of its most convincing features; the way in which it began by saying it might be "good-bye for ever," and ended by confessing that it was, was just the way a maddened man might choose for breaking the news of his terrible intention.
Judged impartially, side by side, the genuine page looked no more genuine than the other.
The clock struck two: the younger man raised his face from a long reverie, and there were the terrible eyes of Scrafton still upon him. He was equally at a loss what to think, what to believe, what to do; but all at once his eyes fell upon the "copy" on his desk; it must go by the three o'clock post, or it would be too late for the next issue.
Mechanically he began folding up his various contributions—punning paragraphs—four-line quips—a set of verses that he had completed. The other set, upon which he had been engaged on Scrafton's entry, he tossed aside, but all that was ready he put into a long envelope, which he addressed, weighed, and stamped as though nobody had been there. Scrafton watched him with his grinning eyes, but leapt up and overtook Harry as he was leaving the room.
"You're not going out, are you?"