ript of the new book, its value estimated on the sales of "The
Diamond Gate." We had not as yet examined the safe in the study, knowing
that it held nothing but the manuscript, and indeed we had not entered
the forbidding room in which our poor friend had died. We kept it
locked, out of half foolish and half affectionate deference to his
unspoken wishes. Besides, Barbara, most exquisitely balanced of women,
who went in and out of the death-chamber without any morbid repulsion,
hated the door of the study to be left ajar, and, when it was closed,
professed relief from an inexplicable maccabre obsession, and being an
inmate of the flat its deputy lady in charge of nurses and servants and
household things, she had a right to spare herself unnecessary nervous
strain. But, all else having been done for the dead and for the living,
the time now came for us to take the manuscript from the safe and hand
it over to the publisher.

So, one dark morning, Jaffery and I unlocked the study-door and entered
the gloom-filled, barren room. The curtains were drawn apart, and the
blinds drawn up, and the windows framed squares of unilluminating
yellow. It was bitterly cold. The fire had not been laid since the
morning of the tragedy and the grate was littered with dim grey ash. The
stale smell of the week's fog hung about the place. I turned on the
electric light. With its white distempered, pictureless walls, and its
scanty office furniture, the room looked inexpressibly dreary. We went
to the library table. A quill pen lay on the blotting pad, its point in
the midst of a couple of square inches of idle arabesques. On three
different parts of the pad marked by singularly little blotted matter
the quill had scrawled "God. A Novel. By Adrian Boldero." On a brass
ash-tray I noticed three cigarettes, of each of which only about an
eighth of an inch had been smoked. Jaffery, who had the key that used to
hang at the end of Adrian's watch-chain, unlocked the iron safe. Its
heavy door swung back and revealed its contents: Three shelves crammed
from bottom to top with a chaos of loose sheets of paper. Nowhere a sign
of the trim block of well-ordered manuscript.

"Pretty kind of hay," growled Jaffery, surveying it with a perplexed
look. "We'll have our work cut out."

"It'll be all right," said I. "Lift out the top shelf as carefully as
you can. You may be sure Adrian had some sort of method."

Onto the cleared library table Jaffery deposited t