"'Thank you,' I said; 'I am glad to find that my failure to recognize the two handwritings as being those of the same man has been shared by two gentlemen who are, like myself in a humble way, experts at handwriting.'
"The next morning I got your letter, written after I had sent you the address, and told Miss Simcoe that I was unexpectedly called back to town, but that it was quite probable that I should ere long be down again, when I would arrange with one or other of the people of whom she had kindly spoken to me. That is all I have been able to learn, Hilda."
"But it seems to me that you have learned an immense deal, Netta. You have managed it most admirably."
"At any rate, I have got as much as I expected, if not more; I have learned that no one recognized this man Simcoe on his first arrival in his native town, and it was only when this old lady had spread the news abroad, and had told the tale of his generosity to her, and so prepared the way for him, that he was more or less recognized; she having no shadow of doubt but that he was her long-lost nephew. In the three days that he stopped with her he had no doubt learned from the dear old gossip almost every fact connected with his boyhood, the men he was most intimate with, the positions they held, and I doubt not some of the escapades in which they might have taken part together; so that he was thoroughly well primed before he met them. Besides, no doubt they were more anxious to hear tales of adventure than to talk of the past, and his course must have been a very easy one.
"Miss Simcoe said that he spent money like a prince, and gave a dinner to all his old friends, at which every dainty appeared, and the champagne flowed like water. We may take it as certain that none of his guests ever entertained the slightest doubt that their host was the man he pretended to be. There could seem to them no conceivable reason why a stranger should come down, settle an income upon Miss Simcoe, and spend his money liberally among all his former acquaintances, if he were any other man than John Simcoe.
"Lastly, we have the handwriting. The man seems to have laid his plans marvelously well, and to have provided against every unforeseen contingency; yet undoubtedly he must have altogether overlooked the question of handwriting, although his declaration that he had almost forgotten how to use his pen was an ingenious one, and I might have accepted it myself if he had written in the rough, scrambling character you would expect under the circumstances. But his handwriting, although in some places he had evidently tried to write roughly, on the whole is certainly that of a man accustomed at one time of his life to clerkly work, and yet differing as widely as the poles from the handwriting of Simcoe, both in the bank ledger and in the letter to his aunt.
"I think, Hilda, that although the matter cannot be decided, it certainly points to your theory that this man is not the John Simcoe who left Stowmarket twenty years ago. He attempted, and I think very cleverly, to establish his identity by a visit to Stowmarket, and no doubt did so to everyone's perfect satisfaction; but when we come to go into the thing step by step, we see that everything he did might have been done by anyone who happened to have a close resemblance to John Simcoe in figure and some slight resemblance in face, after listening for three days to Miss Simcoe's gossip."