He got up. He took his glove out of the crown of his hat, put on his hat in the room, and walked slowly out of the house. In the doorway he looked back at Janet, and she saw, directed at her for the first time, the expression with which she was to grow familiar, that which meets the swindler and the liar.
The brother and sister watched in silence the rigid little departing figure, as it climbed back wrong leg first into the dog-cart and drove away.
Then Fred burst out.
"Oh! you fool, you fool!" he stammered, shaking from head to foot. "Why didn't you say Mrs Brand told you to burn it? His wife was his soft side. Oh! my God! what a chance, and you didn't take it. That man will ruin us yet. I saw it in his face."
"But she didn't tell me to burn it."
Janet looked like a bewildered, distressed child, who suddenly finds herself in a room full of machinery of which she understands nothing, and whose inadvertent touch, as she tries to creep away, has set great malevolent wheels whirring all round her.
"I daresay she didn't," said Fred fiercely, and he flung out of the room.
He went and stood a long time leaning over the fence into the paddock where his yearlings were.
"It's an awful thing to be a fool," he said to himself.