“Yes.”
“He may have been—but the idea is new to me. How——”
“I am not done yet. Now, did it never occur to you—or, I should say, does it not seem probable—that the locket which you had found hidden away in your mother’s jewel-box was in some way connected with the family tragedy you told me of?”
“I have thought of it, Drayton; there is no difficulty in imagining such a thing; the trouble is, we haven’t the slightest evidence of it.”
“I was about to say,” I rejoined, “that there is direct evidence of precisely such a locket having been bought, in the latter part of the seventeenth century, by precisely such a looking man as the hobgoblin you saw to-day. It was to be a wedding-gift to the woman he was to marry the next day.”
“Drayton!”
“That woman deceived him, and eloped on the eve of her marriage with a protégé of his. He professed forgiveness, and sent the locket as a pledge of it.”
“Odd!”
“He died in 1698, and his last recorded words were a curse invoked upon those whom he had before professed to pardon—upon them and their posterity.”
“But, Drayton—what——”