"Yes," said Jack, "I have; but I'm not going to tell you till you've dined. A full man is a less dangerous being than an empty one; you might fall upon me and rend me now, if you thought my idea absurd, as you very likely may."
Entreaties broke like little waves upon the shingle of Jack's obstinacy. I said I was sorry for being rude and angry; I begged to hear his last new idea. Jack's only reply was—
"Dinner's at eight; you'd better change those digging clothes and make yourself look like a decent Christian, if you can."
Jack was perfectly right. Dinner made a wonderful difference in the view I took of things in general; it always does. After dinner, armed with his pipe, sitting over an early fire in our private sitting-room, Jack dismounted from his high horse and admitted me into his confidence.
"I daresay you won't think anything of it," he said; "but it was the portrait of old Clutterbuck that set me dreaming."
"What!" I said, jumping to my feet and seizing a dessert knife, "you don't mean to say, after all my digging, that the money's hidden in it?"
"Why, man, no! I never thought of that," said Jack. "However, open the back carefully and see, if you like."
I did so; I ripped the back off and looked in the space between it and the canvas upon which the odious caricature was painted. An earwig ran out, but there was no treasure. I threw the thing back upon the table, and the knife with it.
"Don't fret," said Jack; "that's not what I meant at all. What I did mean is this: do you suppose that any sane man—and you cannot say that old Clutterbuck was anything else—would any man who was not insane take the trouble to carry a picture to the Gulf of Finland and bury it there for his heirs to find—an odious misrepresentation of his features too—unless there were some object to gain by so doing? In a word, what I can't understand is how both you and I should hitherto have accepted the ridiculous fact without suspicion."
"But we did suspect," I cried. "We said at the time that the thing was about as idiotic as it could be; but when one's right to benefit by a will depends on the sanity of the testator, one doesn't like to air one's opinion that he was mad, even though one may think so."