“Ah”—the sick man drew a sharp breath—“the bankers! Well?”
“They wrote about a check which——”
“Was forged?”
“They think so. It was in your name, and for three hundred pounds.”
There was a long silence. When Sir George spoke again, his voice was changed.
“It must be hushed up. And you must find out the boy and bring him back to me. If—if I were well, it might be different; but I must forgive him now. You will find him out, George?”
“Yes, father.”
Sir George lay back again in silence; but his face was still very stern; there was remorse for his own conduct as well as shame for his ill-brought-up sons in the expression it wore.
George went up to town the next day, and fulfilled the first part of his father’s commission, that relating to the check, without much difficulty; but he failed to find a clew to his brother’s hiding-place, if he were in hiding, which George doubted. It was more characteristic of the Braithwaites to do wrong and brave the consequences openly; and this course, while apparently favoring detection, often proved the safest.
Then a suggestion occurred to him for tracking the runaway. He wrote to Mrs. Mainwaring for the address of Miss Lane’s aunt, and, on the day he received it, he knocked in the afternoon at the door of a very small semi-detached house a few miles out of London. The door had figured glass let into it in place of the upper panels, and he saw a face pressed against one of these in doubtful contemplation of him some minutes after his second ring. His hand was on the bell for the third time, when the door was opened, and a little servant with a very small and very dirty face asked what he wanted. He had not got further than to ask doubtfully if Mrs. Mansfield lived there when she turned round and abruptly left him standing at the entrance of the most pretentious “hall,” for its size, that he had ever seen. For it was esthetically papered, and had an inappropriate dado, while a pair of ugly China monsters left scarcely room for the stranger to pass between them and the umbrella-stand. It was so small that he could distinctly hear the conversation which followed in the backyard.