The action, if action there were to be,
must originate with him. There was no evidence on which they could
bring a charge of felony or even of fraud against him. They could
not drag him into the court. But he knew that all the world would
say that if he were an honest man, he himself would appear there,
denounce his defamers, and vindicate his own name. As day by day he
failed to do so, he would be declaring his own guilt. Yet he knew
that he could not do it.

Was there no escape? He was quite sure now that the price at which he
held the property was infinitely above its value. Its value! It had
no value in his eyes. It was simply a curse of which he would rid
himself with the utmost alacrity if only he could rid himself of all
that had befallen him in achieving it. But how should he escape? Were
he now himself to disclose the document and carry it into Carmarthen,
prepared to deliver up the property to his cousin, was there one
who would not think that it had been in his possession from before
his uncle's death, and that he had now been driven by his fears to
surrender it? Was there one who would not believe that he had hidden
it with his own hands? How now could he personate that magnanimity
which would have been so easy had he brought forth the book and
handed it with its enclosure to Mr Apjohn when the lawyer came to
read the will?

He looked back with dismay at his folly at having missed an
opportunity so glorious. But now there seemed to be no escape. Though
he left the room daily, no one found the will. They were welcome to
find it if they would, but they did not. That base newspaper lied
of him,--as he told himself bitterly as he read it,--in saying that
he did not leave his room. Daily did he roam about the place for an
hour or two,--speaking, indeed, to no one, looking at no one. There
the newspaper had been true enough. But that charge against him
of self-imprisonment had been false as far as it referred to days
subsequent to the rebuke which his housekeeper had given him. But
no one laid a hand upon the book. He almost believed that, were the
paper left open on the table, no eye would examine its contents.
There it lay still hidden within the folds of the sermon, that weight
upon his heart, that incubus on his bosom, that nightmare which
robbed him of all his slumbers, and he could not rid himself of its
presence. Property, indeed! Oh! if he were only back in London, and
his cousin reigning at Llanfeare!