She took them upstairs and lit the lamp, lingering for a little to discuss the weather and the crops, much to Palmer’s annoyance. At last she left them, and the boy, gliding across the room noiselessly as a cat, opened the door and listened. “She’s gone into the kitchen,” he said. “It’s all right.” He looked about him eagerly. It was a fair-sized room, with two windows giving on the street, and two doors, one by which they had entered, and another which, as Palmer opened it, they saw led into a bedroom. Between the two windows was a bookcase, and in a corner by the bedroom door was a writing-table, with two rows of drawers. By the wall, facing the bookcase, stood a piano. With the exceptions of a table and half a dozen chairs and a gilt-framed mirror above the fireplace, this was all the furniture the room contained: there were no pictures, no ornaments of any sort. Palmer went straight to the bookcase and took out an armful of the oldest-looking volumes. Presently he handed one of these to the doctor, open at a page across which Mr. Bradley’s name was scribbled; and next he gave him a book which had evidently been bought not long ago. “They seem to be the same,” the doctor murmured, gathering that he was expected to compare the autographs. “Yes; but the original fly-leaf of the old book has been torn out. It’s the same with all of them: it’s not a mere matter of chance. He has been pretty careful. It was in a manuscript music book that I saw his full name written: it ought to be about here somewhere.” He went to the piano and turned over rapidly a pile of music. In a few moments he found what he was in search of, and brought it to the doctor. “You see, the writing is the same. Only the name was then Clement Bradley Tennant. The two pages have got stuck together. That’s why he didn’t notice it perhaps; or he may have pasted them together purposely, to keep the music that is written on the other side. If you hold it up to the light you can make it out quite distinctly. It was the pages being stuck together that attracted my attention.” The doctor gazed at the signature. “It certainly appears to be the same,” he admitted. Palmer replaced the books and began to prowl about once more. He approached the writing-table, and Doctor O’Neill, with qualms of conscience, watched him examine the contents of a letter-rack, and then turn over the leaves of a blotter. This last he brought to the mirror and held each leaf of it separately up before the glass, scanning it closely, though the blotting-paper was so much used that very little could have been decipherable. The boy’s movements were extraordinarily rapid and silent, and the doctor could only stare at him with a growing consciousness of disapproval. In the end nothing but the recollection of his promise not to interfere prevented him from direct remonstrance.