It was a disappointment.  The house in London would be nearly as stuffy as Paris.  Rose disliked the season and was in no mood for the stale echoes of its dying excitements.  She would not tell her friends that she was back; she would keep as quiet as she had been in Paris.

The first morning, after early service and breakfast, she went to the library to wait for the lawyer’s visit.  It was the only room in which to receive him; the dining-room, and drawing-room, and the little boudoir upstairs, were not opened.  Rose was inclined to leave them as they were, with the furniture in brown wrappers, for the present; but she would rather have seen Mr. Murray in any room but the library.

The morning sun was full on the windows that opened to the rather dreary garden at the back.  She wondered why Mr. Murray had written so urgently, and why Edmund Grosse had not written for several weeks.  Up to now they had done all this horrid business between them, and she had only had occasional reports from her cousin.  Now she must face the subject with the lawyer himself.  She was puzzled to account for the change in the situation.

At the exact moment he had mentioned, Mr. Murray’s tall person with its heavy, bent head appeared in the library.  As they greeted they were both conscious that it was in this same room, seated at the wide writing-table still in the same place, and still bearing the large photograph of Sir David Bright, where he had first told her of the strange dispositions of her husband’s will.  He remembered vividly her look then—­undaunted and confident—­as she had gently but firmly asserted that there must be another will.  But had she not also said it would never be found?

But the present occupied the lawyer much more than the past.  He was eager and a little triumphant in his story of the progress of the case, and did not notice that the sweet face opposite to him became more and more white as he went on.  He told her all he had told Sir Edmund when he first got back from the yacht; he told of the mysterious visit he had received from Dr. Larrone, and how he could prove from the letters of the Florentine detective that Madame Danterre had sent the doctor to England to take a certain small, black box to Miss Dexter.

Then he paused.

“I told Sir Edmund how our Florentine detective, Pietrino, had made friends with one of the nurses, and that she described Madame Danterre ordering the box to be opened and having a seizure—­a heart attack—­while the letters were spread out on her bed.  Nurse Edith said then that she had put them back in a hurry and locked the box, and that it had not been reopened by Madame Danterre.  Some weeks later when she was near her end, Madame Danterre had a scene with Dr. Larrone which ended in his consenting to take the box to London as soon as she was dead, but the nurse was sure that the doctor was told nothing as to the contents of the box.  That was as much as we knew up to Easter, and while