He had not been locked into the chantry.  Perhaps Brother Fabian felt a little shame in his suspicions, or perhaps he forgot to take the precaution.  The door yielded to his touch, and he found himself at liberty to go where he would.

But before turning his steps to his room upstairs, he made an expedition to an outhouse on what appeared to be a curious errand.  It was a dirty, neglected place, and was full of dust and flue and cobweb.  The boy began deliberately collecting masses of this flue and web, and presently he swept up carefully a good-sized heap of dust, which he as deliberately placed in a wooden box, and proceeded to make in one end a number of small holes.

Carefully carrying away this strange load, and bearing it with great secrecy, the boy mounted the stairs very softly, and put down the handkerchief in which the flue was placed in the small unused room beside their sleeping chamber.  With the box still in his hands he stole on tiptoe into the room and looked carefully round him.

His brothers were sleeping lightly, looking as though they would be easily and speedily aroused.  But the monk was snoring deeply, and the bloated face which was turned towards him displayed that abandonment of repose which bespeaks a very sound and even sottish slumber.

The boy looked with repulsion at the flushed face, the open mouth, and dropped jaw.  Something in the expression of that sleeping face filled him with scorn and loathing.  No danger of this man’s awakening; his half-drunken sleep was far too heavy and sodden.

Edred stepped lightly across the room towards the chest which he had had moved the previous evening, and lying at full length along the floor, he proceeded to shake his box after the manner of a pepper pot until he had made beneath the chest a soft layer of dust which looked like the accumulation of weeks.  It was deftly and skilfully done, and although he looked critically at the after effect, to make sure there was nothing artificial about the aspect, he could not detect anything amiss.

The next step was to carry away his box, empty it out of a window, and break in pieces the perforated part, that there might be no tracing his action in this matter.  Then gaining possession of his handkerchief full of flue, he stole softly back again, and laid great flakes between the legs of the chest and the wall, stuffed light fragments into the interstices of the carving, and laid them upon any projecting ledge that was likely to have caught such light dirt as it filtered through the air.

A soft movement in the room told him that his brothers were awake and watching him, though the monk still snored on in his stertorous fashion.  One after the other the pair stole from their beds and looked for a moment at this skilful travesty of nature’s handiwork, and both nodded in token of approval and congratulation.

Edred had an artist’s eye for effect, and did not spoil his handiwork by overdoing it.  The result produced was exactly as if the chest had stood for some time in its present position, so that the dust had gathered beneath it and the flue had clung to the wall behind it.  No one looking at its position there could doubt that it had been there for a period of some weeks.