Most of the money had been skilfully and carefully put where the two conspirators could lay hands on it as soon as it was wanted, and when the term of imprisonment was over they had nothing to do but take possession of it for their own purposes.

They had engineered everything very well--Cotherstone's essentially constructive mind, regarding their doings from the vantage ground of thirty years' difference, acknowledged that they had been cute, crafty, and cautious to an admirable degree of perfection.

Quietly and unobtrusively they had completely disappeared from their own district in the extreme South of England, when their punishment was over.

They had let it get abroad that they were going to another continent, to retrieve the past and start a new life; it was even known that they repaired to Liverpool, to take ship for America.

But in Liverpool they had shuffled off everything of the past--names, relations, antecedents.