"It had been with him for months." And why had he kept it?
He looked round the room sternly, almost savagely, before he answered, fixing his eyes for a moment upon almost every face around him as he did so.

Then he spoke.

"I was driven by shame to keep it,--and then by shame to use it." That this statement was true, no one in the room doubted.
And then the other question was pressed upon him; and he lifted up his hands, and raised his voice, and swore by the Saviour in whom he trusted, that he knew not from whence the money had come to him.

Why then had he said that it had come from the dean?
He had thought so.
The dean had given him money, covered up, in an enclosure, "so that the touch of the coin might not add to my disgrace in taking his alms," said the wretched man, thus speaking openly and freely in his agony of the shame which he had striven so persistently to hide.

He had not seen the dean's monies as they had been given, and he had thought that the cheque had been with them.