hree loose, ragged
piles. We looked through them in utter bewilderment. Some of the sheets
unnumbered, unconnected one with the other, were pages of definite
manuscript; these we put aside; others contained jottings, notes,
fragments of dialogue, a confused multitude of names, incomprehensible
memoranda of incidents. Of the latter one has stuck in my memory.
"Lancelot Sinlow seduces Guinevere the false 'Immaculata' and Jehovah
steps in." Other sheets were covered with meaningless phrases, the crude
drawings that the writing man makes mechanically while he is thinking
over his work, and arabesques such as we found on the blotting pad.

"What the blazes is all this?" muttered Jaffery, his fingers in his
beard.

"I can't make it out," said I. And then suddenly I laughed in great
relief, remembering the absence of the waste-paper basket. We were
turning over what evidently would have been its contents. I explained
Adrian's whimsy.

"What a funny devil the poor old chap was," said Jaffery, with a laugh
at the harmless foible of the artist who would not give even an
incurious housemaid a clue to his mystery. "Well, clear the rubbish
away, and we'll look at the second shelf."

The second shelf was more or less a replica of the first. There were
more pages of consecutive composition--of such we sorted out perhaps a
couple of hundred, but the rest were filled with the same incoherent
scribble, with the same drawings, and with bits of scenarios of a dozen
stories.

"The whole damn thing seems to be waste-paper basket," said Jaffery,
standing over me. There was but one chair in the room--Adrian's famous
wooden writing chair with the leathern pad for which Barbara had
pleaded, the chair in which the poor fellow had died, and I was sitting
in it, as I sorted the manuscript which rose in masses on the table.

"There's quite a lot of completed pages," said I, putting together those
found on the two shelves. "Let us see what we can make of them."

We piled the obvious rubbish on the floor, and examined the salvage. We
could make nothing of it. Jaffery wrinkled a hopeless brow.

"It will take weeks to fix it up."

"What licks me," said I, "is the difference between this and the
old-maidish tidiness of his other papers. Anyhow let us go on."

In a little while we tried to put the sheets together in their order,
going by the grammatical sequence of the end of one page with the
beginning of the next, but rarely could we obtain