"You'll batter the thing to pieces," I said, "see here!" and lifting my stick, which I had been poking at the baby after the irrelevant fashion of old bachelor friends, I hit out aimlessly at the side of the fireplace and struck one of the bricks a smart blow on one end. It turned slightly and slipped out of its place, and as I shouted triumphantly and pulled it away, I displaced its neighbour, too, and poked scornfully at a third. This, however, was firm as a rock, as well as all the others near it, and with a little excited suspicion of something to come I put my hand into the small, square chamber and grasped a dusty, oblong box, of tin, from the feel of it. "Roger!" I gasped, "look here!" "Well, well," he answered vaguely, "don't pull the place down on us, Jerry, that's all!" "But Mr. Jerrolds appears to have discovered a secret hiding-place," Miss Jencks explained succinctly, and then they both stared at me while I drew out from a good arm's reach a tin dispatch box, thick with dust, a foot long and half as wide. I wiped the dust from its surface, and on the cover we read (for Roger and Miss Jencks were at my elbow now, I assure you!) written neatly with some sharp instrument on the black japanned surface, the name _Lockwood Lee Prynne_. With shaking fingers I lifted the lid, which opened readily, then recollecting myself, passed the box to Roger. He glanced curiously at Margarita, but she was absorbed in her music and as lost to us as a contented child. He held the box on his knees, pushed back the lid completely and lifted the top paper of all from the pile. It was badly burned at the edges, as were the packets of letters, the columns clipped from yellowed newspapers, the legal-looking paper with its faded seal and the rough drawings on stained water-colour paper that lay beneath it. It required no highly developed imagination to infer that the contents of the box had been laid on the fire, to be snatched away later. Miss Jencks and I were frankly on tiptoe with excitement, but old Roger's hand was steady as a rock as he unfolded the stiff yellow parchment and spread before us the marriage certificate of Lockwood Lee Prynne and Maria Teresa--alas, the shape of a fatally hot coal had burned through the rest of the name! We skipped eagerly to the next place of handwriting, the officiating clergyman and the parish--for the form was English--but disappointment waited for us there, too, for the same coal had gone through two thicknesses of the folded paper, and only the date, Jan. 26, 186-, broke the expanse of print. The initials of one witness "H.L." and the Christian name "Bertha," of another, had escaped the coal on the third fold, and that was all. Roger drew a long breath. "So it's Prynne, after all," he said quietly, and unfolded the next paper. This was a few lines of writing in a careful, not-too-well-formed hand, on a leaf torn from an old account-book, to judge from the rulings.