s. Holl had been listening with grave interest to the narrative.

"Does I understand you to say, Evan, that no other family but that of
the master's put this three-fingered hand with a knife on to their
things?"

"That's so, mother; leastways it's what the butler says about it."

"Then if that's the case," Mrs. Holl said thoughtfully, "any one who has
got this crest, as you calls it, on his things must be a relation of the
Captain."

"I suppose so, mother; he might be a long distance off, you know,
because this ere affair took place hundreds of years ago, and there may
be a lot of the same family about in different parts."

"So there might," Mrs. Holl said, in a disappointed voice.

"Why, mother," Harry said, "one would think it made some difference to
you, you speak so mournfully about it."

"It don't make no difference to me, Harry," Mrs. Holl said, "but it
makes a lot of difference to you. You know I told you two or three
months ago how you come to be here. I don't know as I told you that
round the neck of your mother, when she died in that room, was a bit of
silk ribbon, and on it was a little seal of gold, with a red stone in
it, which I put by very careful for you, though what good such a thing
would do to you, or anybody else, I didn't see. Well, on that red stone
there was something cut; and father he took it to a chap as understands
about those things, who got some red wax, and hotted it, and dropped
some of it on a paper, and then squeezed this 'ere stone down on it, and
looks at the mark through a eye-glass, and he tells father that it was a
hand with three lingers holding a dagger."

"That was curious, mother," Harry said, "very curious. Can you fetch me
the seal and let me have a look at it? I don't remember ever having seen
it."

The seal was fetched by Mrs. Holl from a pill-box, in which it was
carefully stored away in the corner of a drawer. Harry examined it
closely.

"It looks like a hand holding a dagger," he said, "but it's too small
for me to see whether it has three fingers or four. Evan, will you run
round with it to the little watchmaker's in the next street, and ask him
to look at it with one of the glasses he sticks in his eye when he is at
work, and to tell you whether it has three fingers or four."

Evan returned in a few minutes with the news that the watchmaker at once
said that the hand had but three fingers.

"Well, from that, Harry," Mrs. Holl said, "if what this man have b