"There was a noise," said Themar dully, his face bitter; "I ran for the street. Later the paper was gone."
"What were Tregar's intentions about the paper?"
Themar chewed nervously at his lips.
"His Excellency spoke to me of a paper. He said that I must discover its whereabouts, if possible, but that none but he must steal it. Anything written which you would seem to have hidden would be of interest to him. He bound me by a terrible oath not to touch or read it."
"And you?"
"After a time I swore that I had seen you burn it—"
"Clumsy! Still if he believed it, it left me, in the event of Miss Westfall's complete ignorance of all this hubbub, the sole remaining obstacle."
But Themar had not heard. He was shaking again in the clutch of a heavy chill. Presently, his sentences having trailed off once or twice into peculiar incoherency, he fell to talking wildly of a hut in the Sherrill woods in which he had lived for days in the early autumn, of a cuff in a box buried in the ground beneath the planking. For weeks, he said, he had vainly tried to solve its cipher, stealing away from the farm by night to pore over it by the light of a candle. It was fearfully intricate—
"But you—you that know all," he gasped painfully, "you will get it and read and tell me—"
Moaning he fell back in his chair.