‘What sized books were they?’ he asked.
‘Pretty biggish—one of them quite a large one—the same I’ve seen you, gentlemen, more than once, putting your heads together over. At least it looked like it.’
‘Charley started up and began pacing about the room. Styles saw he had committed some dreadful mistake, and began a blundering expression of regret, but neither of us took any notice of him, and he crept out in dismay.
It was some time before either of us could utter a word. The loss of the sword was a trifle to this. Beyond a doubt the precious tome was now lying in the library of Moldwarp Hall—amongst old friends and companions, possibly—where years on years might elapse before one loving hand would open it, or any eyes gaze on it with reverence.
‘Lost, Charley!’ I said at last.—‘Irrecoverably lost!’
‘I will go and fetch it,’ he cried, starting up. ‘I will tell Clara to bring it out to me. It is beyond endurance this. Why should you not go and claim what both of us can take our oath to as yours?’
‘You forget, Charley, how the sword-affair cripples us—and how the claiming of this volume would only render their belief with regard to the other the more probable. You forget, too, that I might have placed it in the chest first, and, above all, that the name on the title-page is the same as the initials on the blade of the sword,—the same as my own.’
‘Yes—I see it won’t do. And yet if I were to represent the thing to Sir Giles?—He doesn’t care for old books——’
‘You forget again, Charley, that the volume is of great money-value. Perhaps my late slip has made me fastidious; but though the book be mine—and if I had it, the proof of the contrary would lie with them—I could not take advantage of Sir Giles’s ignorance to recover it.’
‘I might, however, get Clara—she is a favourite with him, you know—’