Protestations that anything would do were overruled, and a satisfactory settlement was reached on the way to the front hall, where Mr Fanshawe found his stick, and Mr Richards, after thoughtful pinching of his lower lip, resorted to a drawer in the hall-table, extracted a key, crossed to a cupboard in the panelling, opened it, took a box from the shelf, and put it on the table. “The glasses are in there,” he said, “and there’s some dodge of opening it, but I’ve forgotten what it is. You try.” Mr Fanshawe accordingly tried. There was no keyhole, and the box was solid, heavy and smooth: it seemed obvious that some part of it would have to be pressed before anything could happen. “The corners,” said he to himself, “are the likely places; and infernally sharp corners they are too,” he added, as he put his thumb in his mouth after exerting force on a lower corner. “What’s the matter?” said the Squire. “Why, your disgusting Borgia box has scratched me, drat it,” said Fanshawe. The Squire chuckled unfeelingly. “Well, you’ve got it open, anyway,” he said. “So I have! Well, I don’t begrudge a drop of blood in a good cause, and here are the glasses. They _are_ pretty heavy, as you said, but I think I’m equal to carrying them.” “Ready?” said the Squire. “Come on then; we go out by the garden.” So they did, and passed out into the park, which sloped decidedly upwards to the hill which, as Fanshawe had seen from the train, dominated the country. It was a spur of a larger range that lay behind. On the way, the Squire, who was great on earthworks, pointed out various spots where he detected or imagined traces of war-ditches and the like. “And here,” he said, stopping on a more or less level plot with a ring of large trees, “is Baxter’s Roman villa.” “Baxter?” said Mr Fanshawe. “I forgot; you don’t know about him. He was the old chap I got those glasses from. I believe he made them. He was an old watch-maker down in the village, a great antiquary. My father gave him leave to grub about where he liked; and when he made a find he used to lend him a man or two to help him with the digging. He got a surprising lot of things together, and when he died--I dare say it’s ten or fifteen years ago--I bought the whole lot and gave them to the town museum. We’ll run in one of these days, and look over them. The glasses came to me with the rest, but of course I kept them. If you look at them, you’ll see they’re more or less amateur work--the body of them; naturally the lenses weren’t his making.” “Yes, I see they are just the sort of thing that a clever workman in a different line of business might turn out. But I don’t see why he made them so heavy. And did Baxter actually find a Roman villa here?”