Then there was silence again.
"Do you know that Mercy Fisher is likely to regain her sight?" said Hugh.
"You don't say so? Dear me, dear me!" said the lawyer, sincere at last. "In all the annals of jurisprudence there is no such extraordinary case of identity being conclusively provable by one witness only, and of that witness becoming blind. Odd, isn't it?"
Hugh Ritson smiled coldly.
"Odd? Say providential," he answered. "I believe that's what you church folk call it when the Almighty averts a disaster that is made imminent by your own short-sightedness."
"A disaster, indeed, if her sight ceases to be so providentially short," said the lawyer.
"Get the man out of the way, and the woman is all right," said Hugh. He picked a letter out of a drawer, and handed it to Mr. Bonnithorne. "You will remember that the other was to have shipped to Australia."
Mr. Bonnithorne bowed his head.
"This letter is from the man for whom he intended to go out—an old friend of my father. Answer it, Bonnithorne."
"In what terms?" asked the lawyer.