“With all the pleasure in life, my dear young lady. This letter goes back, in my opinion, to your father’s barrister days, when he was one of the foremost counsel in England. I asked you just now whether he was on the Equity or the Common Law side, and you wondered why I asked the question.”
“I am still wondering,” said Sheila simply.
“On the Equity side they try all sorts of cases concerned with points of law, the majority of them of a very dry and uninteresting character. I should not look in an Equity case for a defeated litigant who would turn into a vindictive enemy of the type of the writer of this letter.”
The young people began to see, as yet very dimly, whither he was leading them.
“On the Common Law side, on the contrary, we are brought into the world of human passion and emotion; one in which the issues of life or death are at stake. We will suppose that your father, in the plenitude of his powers, is retained as counsel against some adroit rogue, some swindling company promoter, for example, who up to that moment had managed to keep himself well on the right side of the law.”
They began to see light, and listened with the closest attention.
“We will say this swindler, a more than usually clever rascal, is living in luxury with his ill-gotten gains, when he makes a slip that brings him within reach of the long arm of justice. One of his victims (or perhaps several in combination) brings an action against him for the return of the money he has inveigled out of him by his lying prospectuses. He employs big counsel to defend him, but your father wins his case. The wealthy rogue is forced to disgorge, finds his occupation gone, and is reduced to penury.”
Sheila nodded to show that she was following his argument.
“I am assuming for a moment that it is a civil action, and that it disclosed sufficient evidence to justify his arrest on a criminal charge later on. I deduce that from the fact that he was not a convicted felon at the time of writing that letter, otherwise he would not have been able to write and send it to your father. The meaning of the words ‘forced me to fly the country’ indicate, in my opinion, that he was in hourly fear of arrest.”
“It seems a very feasible theory,” remarked Wingate.