"Why do you value this piece of steel?" asked Beatrice, as she restored it to him.
"This little piece of steel, Miss Ravengar, is nothing less than the instrument that gave your ancestor Orm his coup-de-grâce. It dropped out of the skull last night. For the future my motto must be, 'When in doubt, consult Miss Ravengar.' By your wit I was enabled to discover the secret entrance to Ormfell; and now, when wondering of what this steel fragment once formed part, you come to my aid again by reading a poem concerning a Norse lady, whose intended action towards her husband seems almost to have a direct bearing upon the Viking's skull. Our Norse forefathers, you will remember, were accustomed to regard their maidens as prophetesses, whose opinions, when solemnly invoked, were to be received as oracles. I will imitate their example, and accept your dictum that this is a fragment of a lady's hairpin."
Godfrey, who had joined the pair a few minutes previously, and had stood a silent listener of the conversation, now intervened with a remark.
"Well, then, you must admit," said he, "that this opinion clashes with the story told by the tapestry, which tapestry avers that Orm died with a cloth-yard shaft sticking in him."
"The two ideas are not irreconcilable," argued Idris. "My belief is that we have here," holding up the piece of steel, "a silent testimony to a domestic tragedy of a thousand years ago. Old Orm the Viking was carried from the battle-field wounded by an arrow. His wife Hilda was perhaps enamoured of some other warrior: and so, while affecting to nurse her husband, she may have hastened his end by secretly driving her strong hairpin into his head, a feat she could perform with comparative safety to herself, there being no coroner's inquest in those days. His death would be attributed to the arrow-wound, and therefore is so represented on the tapestry."
"If your inference be right," said Beatrice, "it is a strange verification of the old saying, 'Murder will out.' Fancy the crime coming to light after the lapse of a thousand years! Though it is not very kind of you, Mr. Breakspear," she added, with a mock pout, "to attempt to prove that my ancestress Hilda was a murderess. You will be saying next that a taste for assassination is one of our family traits, and that the homicidal microbe runs in my blood."
"The lapse of ten centuries will have effectually eliminated it."
"Merci!" she returned, dropping him a mock curtsey. "Yes: it is consoling to reflect that this little piece of family scandal is removed from us by the space of a full millennium."
"But Idris is altogether wrong in his theory," remarked Godfrey decisively. "This piece of steel is not ancient at all."
"Ay, ay, destroyer of my romance!" returned Idris. "Can you give me satisfactory proof that it is not ancient?"