'em--as the police could tell you. And talking about forgeries, what
about old Barrett, who was _the_ great man at Pumpney, when your mother
and I were girls there? That was a fine case of crime going on for years
and years and years, undetected--aye, and not even suspected!"

"What was it?" asked Viner, who had begun by being amused and was now
becoming interested. "Who was Barrett?"

"If you'd known Pumpney when we lived there," replied Miss Penkridge,
"you wouldn't have had to ask twice who Mr. Samuel Barrett was. He was
everybody. He was everything--except honest. But nobody knew that--until
it was too late. He was a solicitor by profession, but that was a mere
nothing--in comparison. He was chief spirit in the place. I don't know
how many times he wasn't mayor of Pumpney. He held all sorts of offices.
He was a big man at the parish church--vicar's warden, and all that. And
he was trustee for half the moneyed people in the town--everybody wanted
Samuel Barrett, for trustee or executor; he was such a solid,
respectable, square-toed man, the personification of integrity. And
he died, suddenly, and then it was found that he'd led a double life,
and had an establishment here in London, and was a gambler and a
speculator, and Heaven knows what, and all the money that had been
intrusted to him was nowhere, and he'd systematically forged, and
cooked accounts, and embezzled corporation money--and he'd no doubt
have gone on doing it for many a year longer if he hadn't had a stroke
of apoplexy. And that wasn't in a novel!" concluded Miss Penkridge
triumphantly. "Novels--Improbability--pooh! Judged by what some people
can tell of life, the novel that's improbable hasn't yet been written!"

"Well!" remarked Viner after a pause, "I dare say you're right, Aunt
Bethia. Only, you see, I haven't come across the things in life that you