ant you."

The old man bowed deeply and went out trembling, but without speaking a
word.

CHAPTER XII--THE CHEST OPENED

Left alone in the turret-room, Edgar Caswall carefully locked the door
and hung a handkerchief over the keyhole. Next, he inspected the
windows, and saw that they were not overlooked from any angle of the main
building. Then he carefully examined the trunk, going over it with a
magnifying glass. He found it intact: the steel bands were flawless; the
whole trunk was compact. After sitting opposite to it for some time, and
the shades of evening beginning to melt into darkness, he gave up the
task and went to his bedroom, after locking the door of the turret-room
behind him and taking away the key.

He woke in the morning at daylight, and resumed his patient but
unavailing study of the metal trunk. This he continued during the whole
day with the same result--humiliating disappointment, which overwrought
his nerves and made his head ache. The result of the long strain was
seen later in the afternoon, when he sat locked within the turret-room
before the still baffling trunk, distrait, listless and yet agitated,
sunk in a settled gloom. As the dusk was falling he told the steward to
send him two men, strong ones. These he ordered to take the trunk to his
bedroom. In that room he then sat on into the night, without pausing
even to take any food. His mind was in a whirl, a fever of excitement.
The result was that when, late in the night, he locked himself in his
room his brain was full of odd fancies; he was on the high road to mental
disturbance. He lay down on his bed in the dark, still brooding over the
mystery of the closed trunk.

Gradually he yielded to the influences of silence and darkness. After
lying there quietly for some time, his mind became active again. But
this time there were round him no disturbing influences; his brain was
active and able to work freely and to deal with memory. A thousand
forgotten--or only half-known--incidents, fragments of conversations or
theories long ago guessed at and long forgotten, crowded on his mind. He
seemed to hear again around him the legions of whirring wings to which he
had been so lately accustomed. Even to himself he knew that that was an
effort of imagination founded on imperfect memory. But he was content
that imagination should work, for out of it might come some solution of
the mystery which surrounded him. And in this f