“What the blazes is all this?” muttered Jaffery, his fingers in his beard.

“I can’t make it out,” said I. And then suddenly I laughed in great relief, remembering the absence of the waste-paper basket.  We were turning over what evidently would have been its contents.  I explained Adrian’s whimsy.

“What a funny devil the poor old chap was,” said Jaffery, with a laugh at the harmless foible of the artist who would not give even an incurious housemaid a clue to his mystery.  “Well, clear the rubbish away, and we’ll look at the second shelf.”

The second shelf was more or less a replica of the first.  There were more pages of consecutive composition—­of such we sorted out perhaps a couple of hundred, but the rest were filled with the same incoherent scribble, with the same drawings, and with bits of scenarios of a dozen stories.

“The whole damn thing seems to be waste-paper basket,” said Jaffery, standing over me.  There was but one chair in the room—­Adrian’s famous wooden writing chair with the leathern pad for which Barbara had pleaded, the chair in which the poor fellow had died, and I was sitting in it, as I sorted the manuscript which rose in masses on the table.

“There’s quite a lot of completed pages,” said I, putting together those found on the two shelves.  “Let us see what we can make of them.”

We piled the obvious rubbish on the floor, and examined the salvage.  We could make nothing of it.  Jaffery wrinkled a hopeless brow.

“It will take weeks to fix it up.”

“What licks me,” said I, “is the difference between this and the old-maidish tidiness of his other papers.  Anyhow let us go on.”

In a little while we tried to put the sheets together in their order, going by the grammatical sequence of the end of one page with the beginning of the next, but rarely could we obtain more than three or four of such consecutive pages.  We were confused, too, by at least a dozen headed “Chapter I.”

“There’s another shelf, anyhow,” said Jaffery, turning away.

I nodded and went on with my puzzling task of collation.  But the more I examined the more did my brain reel.  I could not find the nucleus of a coherent story.  A great shout from Jaffery made me start in my chair.

“Hooray!  At last!  I’ve got it!  Here it is!”

He came with three thick clumps of manuscript neatly pinned together in brown paper wrappers and dumped them with a bang in front of me.

“There!” he cried, bringing down his great hand on the top of the pile.

“Thank God!” said I.

He removed his hand.  Then, as he told me afterwards, I sprang to my feet with a screech like a woman’s.  For there, staring me in the face, on a white label gummed onto the brown paper, was the hand-written inscription: 

“The Diamond Gate.  A Novel—­by Thomas Castleton.”

“Look!” I cried, pointing; and Jaffery looked.  And for a second or two we both stood stock-still.