"Poor
old girl!" he thought; "why do women like that have to die? How she
and Weir would have--argued, to put it mildly. I am afraid I should
have had to put a continent between them. But I would give a good deal
to see her again, all the same."
He shut the door, sat down before his desk, and took a bunch of keys
from his pocket. As he did so, his eyes fell upon one of curious
workmanship, and he felt a sudden sense of pleasant anticipation. That
key opened the Byzantine chest opposite, somewhere in whose cunningly
hidden recesses lay, he was convinced, the papers which he had once
seen in his grandmother's clenched hands. He did not believe she had
destroyed them; she had remarked a few days before her death--which
had been sudden and unexpected--that she must soon devote an
unpleasant hour to the burning of old letters and papers. She
had spoken lightly, but there had been a gleam in her eyes and a
tightening of her lips which had suggested the night he had seen her
look as if she wished that the papers between her fingers were a human
throat.
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