“I am coming to it. It is stereotyped on my brain--all of its accursed riddle, that is to say, but the key. It was dated Newgate, 1679, and was superscribed to one Peachumn, a doctor of divinity, (to whom, you will always bear in mind, it never was delivered), from which honoured friend and counsellor the writer craved certain instruction and advice in a very private and particular matter. He had had confessed to him that night, he said, a passing strange story by one Vining, a prisoner, and grey in iniquity, who was condemned to suffer on the morrow for piracy on the high seas. This Vining, according to his own statement, had been, about the second decade of the century, a student in the great English College of Douai, in France, whence one winter he had been sent, in company with an ordained brother collegiate, on an extraordinary secret mission across the water to a little town on our east coast. This mission, said Vining, was nothing less than to recover, if possible, from its secret hiding-place in the crypts of a certain long abandoned church, a great treasure of gold pieces, which had lain there ever since the suppression of the religious houses--a suppression which, in this case, had but hardly anticipated a natural dissolution more complete. For the church in question was, it appeared, already doomed when the king’s edict fell. Lingering, a relic of the greater past, amidst the ruin of those eastern shores, the sea had since taken its outworks; and now the treasure (the existence and depository of which had been made known through the death-bed confidence of a former sacristan) must be secured without delay, if recovered it were to be at all ... Richard! it _was_ secured by those two--a loaded box of iron. And then the madness of possession smote the wretched clerk. In the darkness of the crypts he murdered his companion, and in the darkness the curse of God fell upon him. His hands were scarlet with consecrated blood. He loathed to handle the price of his iniquity; but, like Judas, he cast it from him, and with it hid the body of his victim in a place whence he hoped neither could again be brought to light to testify against him.” He paused. And “Where was that?” I asked faintly. An extraordinary fancy had taken possession of me--a thought so stunning, so bewildering in its first weak conception, yet so explanatory, if admitted, of Rampick’s incomprehensible behaviour, that I fairly shivered under it. I looked dumfounded at Harry. He also, if I was not mistaken, had been smitten with a like shock of expectancy. “Where was that?” I repeated; and so, innocently, applied the match to this tow. Joshua did not answer, to my surprise, for a moment; and then suddenly I was conscious of the flame rising and blazing in him.