“Twenty thousand pounds?”

Here was a new stunner — I had been calculating on four or five thousand.

This news actually took my breath for a moment: Mr. St. John, whom I had never heard laugh before, laughed now.

“Well,” said he, “if you had committed a murder, and I had told you your crime was discovered, you could scarcely look more aghast.”

“It is a large sum — don’t you think there is a mistake?”

“No mistake at all.”

“Perhaps you have read the figures wrong — it may be two thousand!”

“It is written in letters, not figures, —