The case had excited plenty of attention in Wilchester at the time--Wilchester, that for thirty years had been so far away in thought and in actual distance that it might have been some place in the Antipodes.

It was not a nice case--even now, looking back upon it from his present standpoint, it made him blush to think of.

Two better-class young working-men, charged with embezzling the funds of a building society to which they had acted as treasurer and secretary!--a bad case.

The Court had thought it a bad case, and the culprits had been sentenced to two years' imprisonment.

And now Cotherstone only remembered that imprisonment as one remembers a particularly bad dream.