Yes--it had been real.
His eyes, moody and brooding, suddenly shifted their gaze from the easy chair to his own hands--they were shaking.

Mechanically he took up the whisky decanter from his desk, and poured some of its contents into his glass--the rim of the glass tinkled against the neck of the decanter.
Yes--that had been a shock, right enough, he muttered to himself, and not all the whisky in the world would drive it out of him.

But a drink--neat and stiff--would pull his nerves up to pitch, and so he drank, once, twice, and sat down with the glass in his hand--to think still more.
That old Kitely was shrewd--shrewd! He had at once hit on a fact which those Wilchester folk of thirty years ago had never suspected.

It had been said at the time that the two offenders had lost the building society's money in gambling and speculation, and there had been grounds for such a belief.

But that was not so.