He might have been expected to feel some surprise at his own coolness. But, as a fact, his thoughts were otherwise employed. He was longing, with intense eagerness, for the moment when he might take the next step—when he might open the packet and secure the weapon he needed. He fingered the letters as they lay in their hiding place, and could scarcely refrain from taking them out and examining them there and then. When Lindo returned, and broke into the room with a hearty word about the haste he had made, the curate’s answer betrayed no self-consciousness. On the contrary, he rather underplayed his part, his eye and voice being for, a moment so absent as to surprise his host. The next instant he was aware of this, and conducted himself so warily during the half-hour he remained that he entirely erased from the rector’s mind the unlucky impression of the afternoon. By half-past nine he was back in his own room, at his table, his hat thrown this way, his umbrella that. It took him but a feverish moment to turn up the lamp and settle himself in his chair. Then he took out the packet of letters, and, untying the string which bound them together, he opened the first—there were only six of them in all. This was the one which he had partially read on the former occasion—Messrs. Gearns & Baker’s first letter. He read it through now at his leisure, without interruption, once, twice, thrice, and with a long breath laid it down again, and sat gazing, with knitted brows, into the shadow beyond the lamp’s influence. There was not a word in it, not an expression, which helped him; nothing to show the recipient that he was not the Reginald Lindo for whom the living was intended. The curate sat awhile before he opened the second, and that one he read more quickly. He dealt in the same way with the next, and the next. When, in a short minute or two, he had read them all and they lay in a disordered pile before him—some folded and some unfolded, just as they had dropped from his hands—he leaned back in his chair, and, folding his arms, sat frowning darkly into vacancy. There was not a word to help him in any one of them, not a sentence which even tended to convict the rector. He had been at all his pains for nothing. He had—— The sound of a raised voice asking for him below, and the hasty tread of a foot mounting the stairs two at a time, roused him with a start from the dream of disappointment. In a second he was erect, motionless, and listening, his hand upon and half covering the letters. A hasty knock on the outside of his door, and the touch of fingers on the handle, seemed at the last moment to nerve him to action. It was all but too late. As the rector came hurriedly into the room, the curate, his face pallid, and the drops of perspiration standing on his brow, swept the letters aside and drew a newspaper partly over them. “What—what is it?” he muttered, stooping forward, his hands on the table.