of the house.

He came back presently as noiselessly as he had left the room, and
whispered, 'I am looking for a tin box; is it anywhere about?'

'They opened it to-day, and took some papers out,' said Dick.

Purvis drew one short, quick breath.

'Then let us be off at once,' he said.

He crossed the room once more in his stealthy fashion, and took from
the mantelpiece a small bottle of nerve-tabloids which he had
forgotten, and slipped them into his pocket, and then went out into the
dark again. Once he paused at the entrance of the corridor and
listened attentively, and then crept down the garden path and found the
horses tethered to the paraiso trees. They led them softly through the
monte, and there Dick paused.

'I am going to say good-bye to him,' he said. 'I don't care what you
say!'

He went to the grave under the mimosa trees, and with a queer elfin
gesture he stooped down and kissed the lately disturbed sods, and made
the sign of the cross upon his narrow little chest as he had seen his
Spanish mother do. The dignity of the action, with its unconscious
touch of foreign grace, and the boy's pathetic attempt to keep back his
tears as he lingered by the grave in the darkness at an hour when any
other boy of his age would have been safely tucked up in bed, might
well touch the heart of any one who stood beside the child.

'I didn't know he was hit!' said Purvis suddenly; and probably he spoke
the truth for once in his life. Toffy was one of the few men who in
many years had trusted him, and he had been a good friend to Dick.
'Well, the game's up!' said Purvis. And he and his son mounted their
horses and rode off into the blackness of the night together.

Ross had rescued the black japanned box from the boat, and had kept it
under his care until such time as he should have an opportunity of
giving it to Peter. It was from a sense that it might provide some
sort of distraction to a man almost dazed with grief that he brought it
into the drawing-room on the evening of the day Toffy was buried, and
suggested that perhaps Peter had better open it and see what was in it.
The key was gone, of course, but they prised it open with some tools,
and on the top of the box there was a letter which made Peter lay his
hand over his pocket for a moment. It was as though by some magic the
packet which lay there had been transferred to the interior of a black
japanned box discovered upon a river steamer in the Arge