itors, and I
wasn't going to give it to the new man--don't trust him particularly
not to talk. So I locked it up here--somewhere. And I can't find
it.' And he began restlessly to open drawer after drawer, which
already contained piles of letters and documents, neatly and
systematically arranged, with the proper dockets and sub-headings,
by Elizabeth.

'Oh, it can't be there!' cried Elizabeth. 'I know everything in
those drawers. Surely it must be in the office?' By which she meant
the small and hideously untidy room on the ground floor into which
masses of papers of all dates, still unsorted, had been carted down
from London.

'It isn't in the office!' He was, she saw, on the brink of an
outburst. 'I put it somewhere in this room my own self! And I should
have thought by now you knew the geography of this place as well as
I do!'

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows, but said nothing. The big room indeed
was still full to her of unexplored territory, with _caches_ of all
kinds in it, new and ancient, waiting to be discovered. She looked
round her in perplexity, not knowing where to begin. A large part of
the room was walled with glass cases, holding vases, bronzes, and
other small antiquities, down to about a yard from the floor, and
the space below being filled by cupboards and drawers. Elizabeth
made a vague movement towards a particular set of cupboards which
she knew she had not yet touched, but the Squire irritably stopped
her.

'It's certainly not there. That bit of the room hasn't been
disturbed since the Flood! Now those drawers'--he pointed--'might be
worth looking at.'

She hurried towards them. But the Squire, instead of helping her in
her search, resumed his walk up and down, muttering to himself. As
for her, she was on the verge of laughter, the laughter that comes
from nerves and fatigue; for she had had a long day's work and was
really tired. The first drawer she opened was packed with papers, a
few arranged in something like order by her predecessor, the London
University B.A., but the greater part of them in confusion. They
mostly related to a violent controversy between the Squire and
various archaeological experts with regard to some finds in the Troad
a year or two before the war, in which the Squire had only just
escaped a serious libel suit, whereof indeed all the preliminaries
were in the drawer.

On the very top of the drawer, however, was a conveyance of a small
outlying portion of the Manne