Carfax’s mentor mood slipped away, and he laughed softly.
“Miss Richardia is a dear girl, and worthy of the best that any man can give her, Vance,” he said gently. “Somebody ought to save her from the machinations of a William Wilberforce Hartridge, don’t you think? You can’t, you know; and sometimes I’ve wondered if that doesn’t put it pretty squarely up to me.”
Tregarvon rose and stood over his friend, and for an instant there were black passions to blaze in the wide-set gray eyes. But there was manhood enough underlying the tumult to enable him to throttle the worst of the impulses.
“I—I guess I’m just a jealous dog in the manger, Poictiers,” he confessed gratingly. “I’ve had a hunch that it was going that way, and I’ve been resenting it—like the damned scoundrel I’m coming to be. But it’s all over now, and—and I wish you joy. Can I say more than that?”
Carfax looked up with a quaint twinkle in his eye.
“I’m thinking you might say a good bit more, only you are too charitable to turn the whole menagerie loose. Shall we go in and get ready to eat? Uncle William will be calling us in a minute or so.”
It was not until after the dinner had been eaten, and they were smoking bedtime pipes before the dining-room fire, that Tregarvon went back to the discoveries of the day.
“About the time you were going for your drive this afternoon, I took a walk,” he said, by way of prefacing the story of the last of the discoveries. “I went over the ground we have been covering with the drill, examining every inch of it as if I had lost the set out of a diamond ring. I know now why we have been permitted to go on drilling holes in the rock without interference.”
Carfax nodded. “I’ve had a hint of my own: I wonder if you are not going to confirm it.”
“Perhaps. At any rate, I found that somebody else had been over precisely the same ground with a test-drill a good while ago. I located five holes in all, each of them filled to the top, of course, with sand and washings. One of these holes isn’t twenty feet from the last one we drilled before we moved to the present location in the graveyard glade.”