“I don’t want any—if you’re all right. Good-by,” his visitor repeated, fixing her eyes an instant on an object on his desk that had caught them. His own glanced in the same direction and he saw that in his hurry to shuffle away the packets found in the davenport he had overlooked one of them, which lay with its seals exposed. For an instant he felt found out, as if he had been concerned in something to be ashamed of, and it was only his quick second thought that told him how little the incident of which the packet was a sequel was an affair of Mrs. Ryves’s. Her conscious eyes came back to his as if they were sounding them, and suddenly this instinct of keeping his discovery to himself was succeeded by a really startled inference that, with the rarest alertness, she had guessed something and that her guess (it seemed almost supernatural), had been her real motive. Some secret sympathy had made her vibrate—had touched her with the knowledge that he had brought something to light. After an instant he saw that she also divined the very reflection he was then making, and this gave him a lively desire, a grateful, happy desire, to appear to have nothing to conceal. For herself, it determined her still more to put an end to her momentary visit. But before she had passed to the door he exclaimed: “All right? How can a fellow be anything else who has just had such a find?” She paused at this, still looking earnest and asking: “What have you found?” “Some ancient family papers, in a secret compartment of my writing-table.” And he took up the packet he had left out, holding it before her eyes. “A lot of other things like that.” “What are they?” murmured Mrs. Ryves. “I haven’t the least idea. They’re sealed.” “You haven’t broken the seals?” She had come further back. “I haven’t had time; it only happened ten minutes ago.” “I knew it,” said Mrs. Ryves, more gaily now. “What did you know?” “That you were in some predicament.” “You’re extraordinary. I never heard of anything so miraculous; down two flights of stairs.” “_Are_ you in a quandary?” the visitor asked. “Yes, about giving them back.” Peter Baron stood smiling at her and rapping his packet on the palm of his hand. “What do you advise?” She herself smiled now, with her eyes on the sealed parcel. “Back to whom?” “The man of whom I bought the table.” “Ah then, they’re not from _your_ family?” “No indeed, the piece of furniture in which they were hidden is not an ancestral possession. I bought it at second hand—you see it’s old—the other day in the King’s Road. Obviously the man who sold it to me sold me more than he meant; he had no idea (from his own point of view it was stupid of him), that there was a hidden chamber or that mysterious documents were buried there. Ought I to go and tell him? It’s rather a nice question.” “Are the papers of value?” Mrs. Ryves inquired. “I haven’t the least idea. But I can ascertain by breaking a seal.”