g he were suddenly to fall ill and die--what would happen to the
house and its collections, or to the immense fortune, the proportions of
which the new agent was now slowly beginning to appreciate? All sorts of
questions with regard to the vanished wife and child were now rising
insistently in Faversham's mind. Were they really dead, and if so, how
and where? Once or twice, since his acceptance of the agency, Melrose had
repeated to him with emphasis: "I am alone in the world." Dixon and his
wife preserved an absolute silence on the subject, and loyalty to his
employer forbade Faversham to question them or any other of Melrose's
dependents. It struck him, indeed, that Mrs. Dixon had shown a curious
agitation when, that morning, Faversham had conveyed to her Melrose's
instructions to prepare a certain room on the first floor as the agent's
future bedroom.

"Aye, sir, aye--but it wor Mrs. Melrose's room," she had said, looking
down, her lip twitching a little, her old hands fumbling with the strings
of her apron.

Faversham had asked uncomfortably whether there were not some other room
in a less conspicuous part of the house to which he might be transferred,
the once dismantled drawing-room being now wanted to house the fine
things that were constantly coming to light. Mrs. Dixon shook her head.
All the available rooms were still full of what she called "stoof." And
then she had abruptly left him.

The light was fast failing as he approached the house. By the shearing
away of trees and creeper, at least from all its central and eastern
parts, Threlfall had now lost much of its savage picturesqueness; the
formal garden within the forecourt had been to some extent restored;
and the front door had received a coat or two of paint. But the whole of
the west wing was still practically untouched. There they still were--the
shuttered and overgrown windows. Faversham looked at them expectantly.
The exploration of the house roused in him now the same kind of
excitement that drives on the excavators of Delphi or Ephesus, or the
divers for Spanish treasure. He and Melrose had already dug out so many
precious things--things many of them which had long sunk below the
surface of the old man's memory--that heaven only knew what might turn
up. The passion of adventure ran high; he longed to be at the business
again and was sorry to think it must some day have an end.

That broken window, for instance, now widely open in the west wing,