Amazon.com description: Product Description: This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1916 Excerpt: ...as he was, he sprang from his chair, white and trembling. "What have you come here for?" he demanded. "I took more than a professional interest in the case," answered my friend. "Ten years ago I was younger than I am now. It may have been her youth--her extreme beauty. I think Mrs. Hepworth, in allowing her husband to visit her--here where her address is known to the police, and watch at any moment may be set upon her--is placing him in a position of grave danger. If you care to lay before me any facts that will allow me to judge of the case, I am prepared to put my experience, and, if need be, my assistance, at her service." His self-possession had returned to him. "If you will excuse me," he said, "I will tell the boy that he can go." We heard him, a moment later, turn the key in the outer door; and when he came back and had made up the fire, he told us the beginning of the story. The name of the man buried in Highgate Cemetery was Hepworth, after all. Not Michael, but Alex, the elder brother. From boyhood he had been violent, brutal, unscrupulous. Judging from Ellenby's story, it was difficult to accept him as a product of modern civilisation. Rather he would seem to have been a throwback to some savage, buccaneering ancestor. To expect him to work, while he could live in vicious idleness at somebody else's expense, was found to be hopeless. His debts were paid for about the third or fourth time, and he was shipped off to the Colonies. Unfortunately, there were no means of keeping him there. So soon as the money provided him had been squandered, he returned, demanding more by menaces and threats. Meeting with unexpected firmness, he seems to have regarded theft and forgery as the only alternative left to ...