The hunchback closed, locked, and bolted the door and followed us into the room, placing the candle, with great deliberation, on the mantelpiece. Then, rubbing his hands together and still sneering, he turned and faced us. "And now, gentlemen," he said, never attempting to ask us to be seated, "perhaps you will be as good as to tell me to what I owe the honour of this visit? Myself, I should have thought that my young friend here, Hugh Glynn, had had enough of Peter Zouche and his shop and of his way of paying out silly fellows who try to upset his plans." Cooper-Nassington took a step forward and interposed his big brawny frame between myself and the hunchback. "Look here, Zouche," he said in that strong, masterful way of his, "leave those tricks of nastiness for children, who may, perhaps, fly into a temper over them, and lose sight of the object of their visits, but we sha'n't." And he flung his hat deliberately on the table, and, dragging forward the most comfortable chair in the room, he coolly seated himself therein, pulled out a cigar case, extracted a weed therefrom, and began to smoke. "As for you, Glynn," he cried to me in a pause between the puffs, "you make yourself at home too. Have a cigar," handing me the case and a box of vestas, "but don't let that old scoundrel, Zouche, have one. It all depends on his behaviour whether we ever leave him again now we've taken up our quarters in this musty old den of his." And he reached for a decanter of whiskey and a glass which were standing near, but the hunchback, who was now pallid with rage, made a grab for him and dragged them out of his grasp. "You brute!" he hissed. "The same old brute too. Tell me your business, and get you gone." "Ah, now you're talking sense," said my companion, whose object evidently had been to get the hunchback into a rage, "and I'll repay your compliment by emulating your example and talking to the point too. As you guess, I have come about those three old manuscripts which you purchased at the sale of the effects of a certain Father Alphonse Calasanctius. You have had time to decipher them since, and you know they are of precious importance to the gentleman who is employing Mr Glynn here, to that young idiot, Lord Fotheringay, and, also incidentally, to myself. Now, what did they contain?" And he fixed Peter Zouche with those terrible eyes of his.