Maurice did not leave Borcel End for some days after the funeral. He saw how Martin clung to him in this dark hour, when the sense of bereavement was still a new and strange pain to the young heart, and, anxious though he was to return to his library and Justina, he lingered, loth to leave, since departure might seem unkind. When he told Martin that he had literary work to do—that young man being aware that his friend was some manner of author, though not in the least suspecting him to be capable of poetry—Martin argued that it was just as easy to write at Borcel End as in London; easier, indeed, since there was so small a chance of interruption.

‘I’ve heard you say that the great beauty of your trade is, that it requires no “plant,” except, a ream of paper and a bundle of pens,’ said Martin.

‘Did I say that? Ah, I forgot one important item—the library of the British Museum, some millions of books, more or less; I may not want to refer to them very often, perhaps, but I like to have them at my elbow.’

‘The book you’re writing is something prodigiously learned, then, I conclude,’ said Martin.

‘Not at all, but it is nice to be able to verify a quotation. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you, Martin. I’ll stop at Borcel a week, if you’ll promise to go to London with me when I leave. You told me that your poor mother’s death would set you free.’

‘So it will by and by; but not just yet. It would be unkind to leave father while his grief is fresh. He’s so completely down.’

‘Upon my word, Martin, I’m afraid you’re right,’ answered Maurice. ‘But, remember, you must come to me directly you feel at liberty to leave Borcel—come to me and share my home, just as you would if I were your elder brother.’

Martin employed the day after the funeral in looking over his dead mother’s hoards, a painful task, but not a difficult one. Bridget Trevanard’s possessions had been kept with the most perfect neatness, every scrap of lace or ribbon folded and laid in its place. All the old-fashioned trinkets of her girlhood treasured in their various boxes; the desk and workbox of her school days in perfect order. Strange that these trifles should be so much less perishable than their owner.

But despite his careful examination of his mother’s drawers and boxes, Martin failed to find the object of his search, that old family Bible with the clasps, which he had described to Maurice. The book was nowhere to be found. Martin distributed his mother’s clothes, the best to old Mrs. Trevanard, to do what she liked with, the rest to the two handmaidens, both tolerably faithful after their manner, and honestly regretful of a mistress who, though sharp and exacting, had been just in her dealings with them, and careful of their comfort. The trinkets, and workbox, and desk, and little collection of gift-books, chiefly of a devotional character, Martin Trevanard put away, under lock and key, in the old bureau, opposite his mother’s bed. He kept them for Muriel, with the faint idea that some day the light of reason might return, if only in some small measure, to that clouded brain.

‘No one else has so good a right to them,’ he said to himself, as he put away these homely treasures, ‘and no one else shall have them while I live.’

‘I suppose my dear mother must have given that Bible away,’ he said to Maurice, after describing his unsuccessful search. ‘And yet it was hardly like her to give away an old family Bible. She was one who set so much store by old things, and above all by her religious books.’

At that moment there flashed across Maurice’s recollection one hitherto forgotten word in the dying woman’s broken sentence.

‘Gave—family Bible—’

That word ‘gave’ confirmed Martin’s idea. The Bible had been given away—but to whom? and why did it concern Maurice, in his endeavour to right the wrongs of the past, to know that fact? Why, indeed, unless the Bible had been given to Mr. and Mrs. Eden, the people who took Muriel’s infant?

He went over in his note-book the story which Bridget Trevanard had told him. He had been careful to write down all the facts, recording every detail as closely as possible, a few hours after he received that story of the past from the invalid’s lips. Going over it carefully in the silence of his own room on the second night after the funeral, he came to this passage—‘I made them take a solemn oath upon my Bible, binding them to perform their part of the bond.’

It was clear, then, that Mrs. Trevanard had carried her Bible to the loft—that the oath had been sworn upon her own Bible. Was it not likely that on so solemn an occasion as her parting with these people, who were to carry the last of her race—the nameless child she discarded—away with them, she, a woman of deep religious convictions, might have given them her Bible, the most sacred gift she could bestow, symbol of good faith between them?

Now if this Bible had been given, and the name of Martin’s great-grandmother, Justina Trevanard, was written in it, the fact would add one more link to that chain of evidence which Maurice Clissold had been putting together lately.

It had entered into his mind that Justina Elgood was Muriel’s daughter—the child given into the keeping of strangers, perhaps—ah! too bitter thought, the child of shame.

The facts in support of this notion were not many, would have made very little impression, perhaps, in a court of justice, yet, though he struggled against a notion which appeared to his sober reason absurd and groundless, his fancy was taken captive, and dwelt upon the idea with a tormenting persistence.

In the first place he was a poet, and there seemed to him a curious fatality in all the circumstances connected with his presence at Borcel End. He had gone there by the merest accident, guided by that will-o’-the-wisp of a child, tramping miles across a barren moor, intruding himself on an unwilling hostess. Then on the very first night of his habitation beneath that lonely roof he had been visited by one who, if not a wanderer from the shadow-world, was at least a ghost of the pas............