ted suspicion of
something to come I put my hand into the small, square chamber and
grasped a dusty, oblong box, of tin, from the feel of it.

"Roger!" I gasped, "look here!"

"Well, well," he answered vaguely, "don't pull the place down on us,
Jerry, that's all!"

"But Mr. Jerrolds appears to have discovered a secret hiding-place,"
Miss Jencks explained succinctly, and then they both stared at me
while I drew out from a good arm's reach a tin dispatch box, thick
with dust, a foot long and half as wide. I wiped the dust from its
surface, and on the cover we read (for Roger and Miss Jencks were at
my elbow now, I assure you!) written neatly with some sharp instrument
on the black japanned surface, the name _Lockwood Lee Prynne_. With
shaking fingers I lifted the lid, which opened readily, then
recollecting myself, passed the box to Roger. He glanced curiously at
Margarita, but she was absorbed in her music and as lost to us as a
contented child. He held the box on his knees, pushed back the lid
completely and lifted the top paper of all from the pile. It was badly
burned at the edges, as were the packets of letters, the columns
clipped from yellowed newspapers, the legal-looking paper with its
faded seal and the rough drawings on stained water-colour paper that
lay beneath it. It required no highly developed imagination to infer
that the contents of the box had been laid on the fire, to be snatched
away later.

Miss Jencks and I were frankly on tiptoe with excitement, but old
Roger's hand was steady as a rock as he unfolded the stiff yellow
parchment and spread before us the marriage certificate of Lockwood
Lee Prynne and Maria Teresa--alas, the shape of a fatally hot coal had
burned through the rest of the name! We skipped eagerly to the next
place of handwriting, the officiating clergyman and the parish--for
the form was English--but disappointment waited for us there, too, for
the same coal had gone through two thicknesses of the folded paper,
and only the date, Jan. 26, 186-, broke the expanse of print. The
initials of one witness "H.L." and the Christian name "Bertha," of
another, had escaped the coal on the third fold, and that was all.

Roger drew a long breath.

"So it's Prynne, after all," he said quietly, and unfolded the next
paper.

This was a few lines of writing in a careful, not-too-well-formed
hand, on a leaf torn from an old account-book, to judge from the
rulings.

"Sept. 24, 186-. The child