"To impart additional hardness."
"I must accept your dictum as final. Of course the conclusion is that if the steel be modern, the skull must be modern, too. I must give up my belief, Miss Ravengar, that I possess the skull of your Viking ancestor. But then," he went on, "Orm was buried within that hillock: the pictured tapestry and the name Ormfell prove it. What, then, has become of his remains?"
"Crumbled to dust, perhaps, with the lapse of time," suggested Beatrice.
"The existence of the tapestry confutes you. Solid bone would not crumble, if a woollen fabric will endure."
"True," replied Beatrice, with a puzzled look. "I am forgetting the tapestry. Here's a mystery, indeed! What has become of the Viking's bones?"
"If the skeleton within the tumulus be that of a modern person," said Idris, "how on earth came it there? Who buried him, and——"
"We do not yet know that it is a 'him,'" interjected Godfrey. "The skeleton may be the remains of a woman."
"I speak provisionally. Who buried him, or her, and why should such a strange grave be chosen?"
"Because," replied the surgeon, gravely, "because, my dear Idris, cannot you see that the present occupant of Ormfell did not die a natural death? The piece of steel lodged in the brain proves that. He was murdered, murdered with a stiletto hairpin: and he, or they, that did the deed, knowing, as we know, that Ormfell contains a grave-chamber, disposed of the victim's body by placing it within the hillock, no doubt thinking that the remains, if ever discovered, would be taken for those of some ancient warrior, an error into which we ourselves would have fallen had not that tapestry remained, I might say, providentially remained, to tell us otherwise."
For a few moments both Beatrice and Idris sat dumbfounded at this startling theory.