The jade Joss had the room to himself. There was little enough light and no fire. Gray shadows hung thick in the place, palpable and dreary. The blinds were down and the curtains all drawn. It was late afternoon in January—a cold, forbidding day; and the room itself, once the heart of the house, was even colder, more ghoul-like. Only one or two thin shafts of sickly light crept in, penetrating the gloom—but not lifting it, intensifying it rather.

Joss looked cold, neglected and alien. The rose-colored lotus looked pinched, gray and frozen—poor exiled pair, and here and so they had been since a few days after Richard Bransby’s death, when Helen had left the room, locking it behind her, and pronounced it taboo to all others.

But now a key turned in the door, creaking and stiffly, as if long unused to its office.

In the hall, Mrs. Leavitt drew back with a shiver and motioned imperatively to Stephen to precede her. “How dark it is,” she said, and not very bravely, following him in not ungingerly.

“Yes,” he answered crisply. He had not come there to talk. And, like her, he was intensely nervous; but from a very different cause. Dead men, and the places of their last earthly resting, meant nothing to him.

“And cold. Stephen, light the fire while I draw the curtains. Have you matches?”

“Of course.” He knelt at the fireplace and set a match to the gas logs. Mrs. Leavitt drew the curtain aside and raised the blinds. The winter sunlight came streaming through the windows, a chilled unfriendly sunshine, but it flooded the room. Pryde looked about quickly, and the woman did too.

She was much affected. “Oh, Stephen, how this room does bring it all back to me! It seems as if it were only yesterday that Richard was here—poor Richard.” Then her eyes caught their old prey—dust—and dust—dust everywhere. She pulled open a drawer under the bookshelves and caught up a little feather duster that had always been kept there.

But Stephen checked her abruptly. “Don’t touch that table—don’t touch anything on any of the tables,” he said sharply.

“Well, I’m sure——”

“No—you must not. I—I promised Helen——”

“Promised Helen?”

“That no one should lay hand on even one thing, no one but myself, and that I would touch as little as possible—just to find the papers.”

“Well, I’m sure——”

His eye fell upon the bit of jade and he pointed to it, laughing nervously. “Especially, I had to promise her that I’d not lay a finger on that. You remember how Uncle Dick used absent-mindedly to play with it. And Helen declares that no one shall ever touch it again but herself, and she only to dust it.”

“Well, it needs dusting now, right enough,” Mrs. Leavitt remarked resentfully.

“Are you quite sure that everything here is exactly as Uncle Dick left it?” In spite of himself he could not keep his hideous anxiety out of his voice.

But Mrs. Leavitt did not notice. She was looking furtively about the unkempt room with disapproving eyes. She answered mechanically, “Oh—yes—everything. The day Richard’s coffin was carried out of it, Helen locked it up herself, just as it was. It has never been opened since.”

“She didn’t disturb any of the papers on this table?”

“No.”

“And no one has been here since, you are sure?”

“Of course I’m sure,” she replied acidly. “If I refused you, my own nephew, admission twenty times at least, I wouldn’t allow any one else in, would I? Helen said, before she went up to town to live because she couldn’t bear to stay here, poor child—it’s very lonely without her—well, she said that she did not want any one to come in here until she returned. Naturally I respected her wishes—orders, you might call them, since this is her house now—not that I grudge that. Well, now you come with this letter from her, saying that you are to do what you like in the library, and are to have her father’s keys—so of course I opened it for you—and glad enough to get it opened at last—and here are the keys; it’s only recently I’ve had them. Helen kept them herself for a long time.”

Stephen took them from her quickly—almost too quickly, had she been a woman observant of anything but dust and disorder. “I persuaded her to write it,” he said. “It is time her father’s papers were looked over, and it would be too heavy a task for her—too sad.”

“Stephen, is she still grieving over Hugh’s disappearance?”

Pryde shrugged his shoulders. “H’m, yes.”

“Poor child—poor child! It seems as if everything were taken from her at once. And to think that a nephew of mine—well, nearly a nephew—should desert from the army, and in war time, too—that there should be a warrant out for his arrest! Just do look at that dust!”

Stephen’s patience was wearing thin. “If you’ll excuse me now, Aunt Caroline——”

“Of course—you have a great deal to do, and I have too; the servants get worse and worse. Servants! They’re not servants; war impostures, I call them. Well, I’ll leave you now.” But at the door she turned again. “Stephen!”

“Yes.” He tried not to say it too impatiently.

“There isn’t anything of great value in this room, is there?”

“Why, no,” he said nervously.

“That’s odd.”

“Why—odd?” His voice was tense, and he did not look at her.

“Three times since Richard died, burglars have tried to force their way through the windows in this room.”

“Oh!” Pryde managed to say, and it was all he could manage to say.

“Always the same windows, you understand. Each time, fortunately, we frightened them away.”

“You have reported the matter to the police?” The anxiety made his voice husky.

“Yes, but all they ever did was to make notes.”

“You have no idea who the burglar was? Burglars, I mean,” correcting himself awkwardly. “You never caught sight of him—them?”

“No—not a glimpse.”

“No—oh, just some tramp, I dare say.”

He was easier now, but his voice was a little unsteady from strain and with relief. “And now please——”

“Yes, I’ll hurry away now. Barker is dusting the best dinner service—if I’m not there to watch, she’s sure to break something. Call me, if you want me.”

“I shan’t want you, Aunt Caroline.”