He gazed at her. "I understand," he said after an instant. "You mean that they prove his death."
She assented gently, without speaking. As he approached the box, she drew back from it and slipped away into the next room. She walked up and down there, pressing her hands together. He must be looking at the things now, unrolling the muffler.... What would he be feeling as he saw them? Would he be glad, with that same gladness which had mingled with her own sorrow over Uncle Benny, that his father was gone—gone from his guilt and his fear and his disgrace? Or would he resent that death which thus left everything unexplained to him? He would be looking at the ring. That, at least, must bring more joy than grief to him. He would recognize that it must be his mother's wedding ring; if it told him that his mother must be dead, it would tell him that she had been married, or had believed that she was married!
Suddenly she heard him calling her. "Miss Sherrill!" His voice had a sharp thrill of excitement.
She hurried toward the sun room. She could see him through the doorway, bending over the card table with the things spread out upon its top in front of him.
"Miss Sherrill!" he called again.
"Yes."
He straightened; he was very pale. "Would coins that my father had in his pocket all have been more than twenty years old?"
She ran and bent beside him over the coins. "Twenty years!" she repeated. She was making out the dates of the coins now herself; the markings were eroded, nearly gone in some instances, but in every case enough remained to make plain the date. "Eighteen-ninety—1893—1889," she made them out. Her voice hushed queerly. "What does it mean?" she whispered.
He turned over and reexamined the articles with hands suddenly steadying. "There are two sets of things here," he concluded. "The muffler and paper of directions—they belonged to my father. The other things—it isn't six months or less than six months that they've lain in sand and water to become worn like this; it's twenty years. My father can't have had these things; they were somewhere else, or some one else had them. He wrote his directions to that person—after June twelfth, he said, so it was before June twelfth he wrote it; but we can't tell how long before. It might have been in February, when he disappeared; it might have been any time after that. But if the directions were written so long ago, why weren't the things sent to you before this? Didn't the person have the things then? Did we have to wait to get them? Or—was it the instructions to send them that he didn't have? Or, if he had the instructions, was he waiting to receive word when they were to be sent?"
"To receive word?" she echoed.