"Child?" interrupted Calamity. "Did George have a child, then?"
"Yes, a little girl. She'd be about twelve now."
"And Lady Betty, I suppose, is still at the Towers?"
Calamity's lips tightened and his brows met in a frown. The lawyer regarded him for a moment, and then, leaning forward, touched him gently on the knee.
"You're thinking of that wretched business of the alleged forgery," he said. "You may safely regard it as forgotten now; at least, no one is ever likely to refer to it in any way unless----" Vayne hesitated and smiled.
"You may safely dismiss that possibility from your mind," he said. "But, as it happens, I'm going to reopen the matter myself."
"You remember the story, don't you? A cheque for five thousand pounds was forged in my father's name, and, by a series of artificially prepared 'clues,' it was traced to me. The belief that I was the culprit was strengthened by the fact that I had been playing the fool pretty generally and was head over ears in debt at the time. Well, what you don't know is, that my brother forged the cheque in such a way that I should be suspected. He had been trying to poison the old man's mind against me for a long time and----"
"Was it on account of a woman?" interrupted the lawyer shrewdly.
"Yes; I see you understand. We were both madly in love with the same woman, and--well, my brother held the strong suit. But to continue: the guv'nor accused me outright of forging his signature, and I, being too proud to deny such a vile charge, especially coming from him, was branded as a promising young criminal by the entire family. The guv'nor offered me a sum of money to clear out, which bribe I refused, though I cleared out all the same."
"And you released Lady Betty from her engagement?" murmured Vayne as the Captain paused.
"The night before I left I was sitting at the window of an unlighted room, thinking--God knows what I was thinking, it doesn't matter now--when I heard voices in the shrubbery and recognised them as belonging to my brother and his German valet. Hearing my own name, I leant out of the window and listened; I felt no shame about it, for I guessed the part George had played in my affairs. And, anyway, I wasn't caring much about the conventions just then. There's no need to repeat what I heard, but my suspicions were confirmed, and when the pair moved out of the shrubbery I knew for certain that, between them, they had engineered my ruin. To put the matter in a nutshell, my brother had forged the cheque, having previously arranged matters so that suspicion should fall on me.