or to replenish
the empty match-boxes. Those chance words that dropped from Dexter
would, no doubt, exactly describe the state of his room when he returned
to Gleninch, with the prisoner and his mother, from Edinburgh. That
he tore up the mysterious letter in his bedroom, and (finding no means
immediately at hand for burning it) that he threw the fragments into
the empty grate, or into the waste-paper basket, seems to be the most
reasonable conclusion that we can draw from what we know. In any case,
he would not have much time to think about it. Everything was done in a
hurry on that day. Eustace and his mother, accompanied by Dexter, left
for England the same evening by the night train. I myself locked up the
house, and gave the keys to the lodge-keeper. It was understood that
he was to look after the preservation of the reception-rooms on the
ground-floor; and that his wife and daughter were to perform the same
service between them in the rooms upstairs. On receiving your letter,
I drove at once to Gleninch to question the old woman on the subject of
the bedrooms, and of Dexter's room especially. She remembered the time
when the house was shut up by associating it with the time when she was
confined to her bed by an attack of sciatica. She had not crossed the
lodge door, she was sure, for at least a week (if not longer after
Gleninch had been left in charge of her husband and herself). Whatever
was done in the way of keeping the bedrooms aired and tidy during her
illness was done by her daughter. She, and she only, must have disposed
of any letter which might have been lying about in Dexter's room. Not a
vestige of torn paper, as I can myself certify, is to be discovered in
any part of the room now. Where did the girl find the fragments of the
letter? and what did she do with them? Those are the questions (if you
approve of it) which we must send three thousand miles away to ask--for
this sufficient reason, that the lodge-keeper's daughter was married
more than a year since, and that she is settled with her husband in
business at New York. It rests with you to decide what is to be done.
Don't let me mislead you with false hopes! Don't let me tempt you to
throw away your money! Even if this woman does remember what she
did with the torn paper, the chances, at this distance of time, are
enormously against our ever recovering a single morsel of it. Be in no
haste to decide. I have my work to do in the city--I can give you