ade him earnestly, indeed I thought quite
anxiously, shake his head and wave his finger. "Give it up--give it up!"

This wasn't a challenge--it was fatherly advice. If I had had one of his
books at hand I would have repeated my recent act of faith--I would
have spent half the night with him. At three o'clock in the morning, not
sleeping, remembering moreover how indispensable he was to Lady Jane, I
stole down to the library with a candle. There wasn't, so far as I could
discover, a line of his writing in the house.

IV

Returning to town I feverishly collected them all; I picked out each in
its order and held it up to the light. This gave me a maddening month,
in the course of which several things took place. One of these, the
last, I may as well immediately mention, was that I acted on Vereker's
advice: I renounced my ridiculous attempt. I could really make nothing
of the business; it proved a dead loss. After all, before, as he had
himself observed, I liked him; and what now occurred was simply that my
new intelligence and vain preoccupation damaged my liking. I not
only failed to find his general intention--I found myself missing the
subordinate intentions I had formerly found. His books didn't even
remain the charming things they had been for me; the exasperation of my
search put me out of conceit of them. Instead of being a pleasure the
more they became a resource the less; for from the moment I was unable
to follow up the author's hint I of course felt it a point of honour
not to make use professionally of my knowledge of them. I _had_ no
knowledge--nobody had any. It was humiliating, but I could bear it--they
only annoyed me now. At last they even bored me, and I accounted for my
confusion--perversely, I confess--by the idea that Vereker had made a
fool of me. The buried treasure was a bad joke, the general intention a
monstrous _pose_.

The great incident of the time however was that I told George Corvick
all about the matter and that my information had an immense effect upon
him. He had at last come back, but so, unfortunately, had Mrs. Erme,
and there was as yet, I could see, no question of his nuptials. He was
immensely stirred up by the anecdote I had brought from Bridges; it fell
in so completely with the sense he had had from the first that there was
more in Vereker than met the eye. When I remarked that the eye seemed
what the printed page had been expressly invented to meet he immediately
accus