"Yes."
Caston went across to the table, and, opening his knife, inserted it under the lid. The girl stood at his side, a gleam of hope in her eyes. Caston ran the blade of the knife along to the lock and turned it, prising up the lid. There was a sound of the splitting of wood, and the lock gave. Caston lifted the lid. It rose on hinges, and had upon the under-side a bevelled mirror, and it disclosed, when open, a fixed tray lined with blue velvet. The tray was empty.
But now that the lid was raised in the centre of the table, the side-pieces could be opened too. The girl opened the one at her hand. Caston saw a well, lined, like the rest, with velvet, and filled with the knick-knacks and belongings of a girl. She took them out hurriedly, heaping them together on the tray--a walnut-wood housewife shaped and shut like a large card-case, with scissors, thimble, needle-case, tiny penknife, all complete--for she opened it, as she opened everything in the haste and urgency of her search--a large needle-case of ivory, a walnut-wood egg, which unscrewed and showed within a reel with silk still wound upon it, and a little oval box with a label on the top of it, and the royal arms. Caston read the label:
STRINGER'S CANDY.
PREPARED AND SOLD ONLY BY THE PROPRIETOR,
R. STRINGER,
DRUGGIST TO THE KING.
The top fell from the little box, and a shower of shells rattled out of it. Bags of beads followed, wash-leather bags carefully tied up, and some of them filled with the minutest of beads. It made Caston's eyes ache to think of anyone stringing them together. In the end the well was emptied, and, with a gesture of despair, the girl slipped round to the other side of Caston. She turned back the flap upon this side.
On the other side were the implements of work; here was the finished product. She lifted out two small anti-macassars, completely made up of tiny beads in crystal and turquoise colours, and worked in the most intricate patterns. They were extraordinarily heavy, and must have taken months in the making. Under these were still more beads, in boxes and in bags and coiled in long strings. She heaped them out upon the tray, and looked into the well. Her face flashed into relief. She thrust her hands in; she drew out from the very bottom a faded bundle of letters. She clasped them for a moment close against her heart, then very swiftly, as though she feared to be stopped, she took them over to the fireplace.
A fire was burning in the grate, for the night was chilly. She dropped the bundle into the flames, and stood there while it was consumed. Caston saw the glare of the flames behind the paper light up here and there a word or a phrase, and then the edges curled over and the sparks ran across the sheets, and the letters changed to white ashes and black flakes. When all was done, she sighed and turned to Caston with a wistful smile of thanks. She moved back to the table, and with a queer orderliness which seemed somehow in keeping with her looks and manner, she replaced the beads, the little boxes, and the paraphernalia of her work carefully in the wells, and shut the table up. She turned again to Caston at the end. Just for a second she stood before him, her face not happy, but cleared of its trouble, and with a smile upon her lips. She stood, surely a living thing. Caston advanced to her. "You will stay now!" he cried, and she was gone.
This is the story as Harry Caston told it to Mrs. Wordingham when he returned to London in the autumn. She ridiculed it gently and with a trifle of anxiety, believing that solitude had bred delusions.
"Thank you," said Harry Caston grimly, and sitting up very erect. Mrs. Wordingham changed her note.
"It's the most wonderful thing to have happened to you," she said. "I should have been frightened out of my life. And you weren't?"