The room--that one furnished chamber--they left to the last. It was their moral refuge--their forlorn hope. There, at least, was visible evidence of the material side of the long-dead highwayman. Therein had he donned his guilty finery; or doffed it and confided the secrets of his cancerous conscience to the fine lawn of his pillow. And therein--unless a nice acumen should have led him to avoid that spot for his treasure’s hiding most patently inviting to common intelligences--was it presumable the stone was concealed. At length the two bent their steps to this inner temple of their expectations. They were weary and a little depressed, and they sat themselves down in a fan of weak sunlight that spread through the broad window. Sir David looked about him with some listless curiosity--at the great posted bed; at the massive carved wardrobe of sombre oak; at the quaint old brass-framed mirror on the dressing-table. “Was this all as it stands when you came?” he said, his inquisitiveness getting the better of his languor. “Precisely as it stands.” “Then it belonged to Cutwater?” “I presume so.” “By cock!” said the other, dreamily introspective, “’tis cursed strange to think that here the man prinked and made his toilet and slept his sleep like any decent citizen. He was known by his blue coat and filigree lace, I’ve heard tell; and what bloody secrets may he not have locked into that wardrobe, and what dumb witnesses to his villainy? For he would take life, by all accounts, and was a terror in his day. And was there nothin’, Tuke--no trace----” “Not a rag in all the room. If any had been, it had been cleared out before I came.” “Well, he had his vanities; for all that his reputation, as I knew it, was rascal miserly. And he shows a pretty taste in bed and wardrobe. But there ain’t one consistent miser in all the history of niggards.” “I seem to have heard of one or two.” “Who, sir? tell me.” “Well, for a few--‘Plum’ Turner, ‘Vulture’ Hopkins, Elwes, Jones, Betty Bolaine----” “Oh! I cry you mercy, as the books say. These were the best of their kind; yet not one of ’em but would give in charity occasionally. And each would have its vanity, if you came to look. Mrs. Bolaine boasted her coach; and even Jones must have a new brim to his hat. No, sir. Two orders of misers there be--your Joneses and Dancers for one; and of the other every third man in the tale of humanity.” “Tut-tut!” “Oh! I mean it--the host of those who give a half-heart to gathering, but a whole one against dissipating. Now, did you ever hear of a miser who killed himself to save expense?” “No, I didn’t.” “Nor I. Yet that should be the right moral of parsimony.” “No, no, my friend. Possession is the disease.” “Then how better to minister to it than by realizing one’s property, hoisting the metal into a sack, tying oneself thereto, and tilting all into the deep sea?” “There would be the hire of the boat; but never mind. You give thought to things, I see.”