The Deliverance by Ellen Glasgow — Read

Carraway had risen to meet his host in a flutter that was almost one of dread. In the eight years since their last interview it seemed to him that his mental image of his great client had magnified in proportions -- that Fletcher had "out-Fletchered" himself, as he felt inclined to put it. The old betrayal of his employer's dependence, which at first had been merely a suspicion in the lawyer's mind, had begun gradually, as time went on, to bristle with the points of significant details. In looking back, half-hinted things became clear to him at last, and he gathered, bit by bit, the whole clever, hopeless villainy of the scheme -- the crime hedged about by law with all the prating protection of a virtue. He knew now that Fletcher -- the old overseer of the Blake slaves -- had defrauded the innocent as surely as if he had plunged his great red fist into the little pocket of a child, had defrauded, indeed, with so strong a blow that the very consciousness of his victim had been stunned.

There had been about his act all the damning hypocrisy of a great theft -- all the air of stern morality which makes for the popular triumph of the heroic swindler.