'Surely it is Douglas Howarth! My dear Douglas, I am very glad to see you. This is Mr. Acrodato. He tells me that some injurious reports have been current with reference to a bill which my father backed at my request. Here is the bill. He has undertaken, in future, to give any such reports which may reach his ears the fullest contradiction. Mr. Acrodato, you may go.'
He went--and, I believe, was glad to go, even though he left both his bill and his money behind him.
CHAPTER XXVI
[THE SCALES OF JUSTICE]
I turned to Mr. John Smith--I should say to my old friend Douglas Howarth; who had been staring from me to Mr. Acrodato, and from Mr. Acrodato back to me, apparently wholly at a loss to understand the situation. Funny how opaque some men can be.
'Conscience,' says the bard, 'makes cowards of us all.' The Prince of Denmark wasn't quite so right as he supposed; but it had certainly succeeded in making, in a marvellously short space of time, a wreck of my dear old friend. Even the inexperienced eye could not fail to perceive that he had aged both morally and mentally. I was willing to bet a trifle that instead of scoring off the little game he had tried to play, he had passed from the prime of life to old age in the course of a single deal. He wasn't half the man who had called himself John Smith. He had acquired a new stoop; and that stoop was typical of all he had acquired. As he stared at me with astonished eyes it was clear that he had not so much control over his nerves as he would have liked to have had.
'As I just observed, I am glad to see you, my dear Douglas. My relatives and friends have not flocked round me as I had hoped they would. Am I to take it that this is a case of better late than never?'
'How did you get out?'
'How did I get out? Of what?'
'How did you get out of the coffin?'