der," said her husband.

"Raison de plus--at that age! But it's rather nice, his long reticence."

"Forty years!" Griffin put in.

"With this outbreak at last."

"The outbreak," I returned, "will make a tremendous occasion of Thursday
night;" and everyone so agreed with me that, in the light of it, we lost
all attention for everything else. The last story, however incomplete
and like the mere opening of a serial, had been told; we handshook and
"candlestuck," as somebody said, and went to bed.

I knew the next day that a letter containing the key had, by the first
post, gone off to his London apartments; but in spite of--or perhaps
just on account of--the eventual diffusion of this knowledge we quite
let him alone till after dinner, till such an hour of the evening, in
fact, as might best accord with the kind of emotion on which our hopes
were fixed. Then he became as communicative as we could desire and
indeed gave us his best reason for being so. We had it from him again
before the fire in the hall, as we had had our mild wonders of the
previous night. It appeared that the narrative he had promised to read
us really required for a proper intelligence a few words of prologue.
Let me say here distinctly, to have done with it, that this narrative,
from an exact transcript of my own made much later, is what I shall
presently give. Poor Douglas, before his death--when it was in
sight--committed to me the manuscript that reached him on the third of
these days and that, on the same spot, with immense effect, he began
to read to our hushed little circle on the night of the fourth. The
departing ladies who had said they would stay didn't, of course, thank
heaven, stay: they departed, in consequence of arrangements made, in a
rage of curiosity, as they professed, produced by the touches with
which he had already worked us up. But that only made his little final
auditory more compact and select, kept it, round the hearth, subject to
a common thrill.

The first of these touches conveyed that the written statement took up
the tale at a point after it had, in a manner, begun. The fact to be in
possession of was therefore that his old friend, the youngest of several
daughters of a poor country parson, had, at the age of twenty, on taking
service for the first time in the schoolroom, come up to London, in
trepidation, to answer in person an advertisement that had already
placed her in brief correspondence with the advertiser. T