She took a bunch of keys from her pocket, unlocked the little secretaire, and from one of the drawers produced a bundle of old letters and cuttings from newspapers, which she handed to Theodore Dalbrook, and then seated herself opposite to him, planted her elbows on the table, and watched him while he read, keenly on the alert for any revelation of his purpose which might escape him in the course of his reading. She had not altogether relinquished that idea of an inheritance, or legacy—property of some kind—involved in this endeavour to trace a dead man’s history. The explanation which Theodore had given had not convinced her. He had confessed himself a lawyer, and that was in itself enough to make her doubt him. The cuttings from old newspapers belonged to the days when Frederick Strangway had commanded a war-ship, to the days when he fought in the Chinese war. Some of them recorded the honour he had won for himself at different stages of his career, and it was only natural that these should have been carefully preserved by him in all his wanderings. But there were other cuttings—the report of the court martial that broke him—the trial in which he stood accused of having risked the loss of his ship with all hands aboard by his dissolute habits—a shameful and a painful story. This record of his folly had been kept by that strange perversity of the human mind which makes a man secrete and treasure documents which must wring his heart and bow his head with shame every time he looks at them. There were other extracts of a like shameful kind—reports of street rows, two cases of drunken assault in San Francisco, one of a fight in Sydney harbour. He had kept them all as if they had been words of praise and honour. The letters were most of them trivial—letters from brother officers of the past—“very sorry to hear of your embarrassments,” “regret inability to do more than the enclosed small cheque,” “the numerous claims upon my purse render it impossible for me to grant the loan requested,” the usual variations upon the old tune in which a heavily-taxed _pater familias_ fences with the appeal of an unlucky acquaintance. They were such letters as are left by the portmanteauful among the effects of the man for whom the world has been too hard. Theodore put aside all this correspondence after a brief glance, and there remained only four letters in the same strong, resolute hand—the hand of Reginald Strangway. The first in date was written on Army and Navy Club paper, and was addressed to Captain Strangway, R.N., H.M.S. _Cobra_, Hong Kong. “MY DEAR FRED,