I would, quite certainly, have gone away as I came, clueless, had I not attempted to straighten a pile of books, dangerously sagging—­ like my chin!—­and threatening a fall.  My effort was rewarded by a veritable Niagara of books.  They poured over the edge, a few first, then more, until I stood, it seemed, knee-deep in a raging sea of atheism.

Somewhat grimly I set to work to repair the damage, and one by one I picked them up and restored them.  I put them in methodically this time, glancing at each title to place the volume upright.  Suddenly, out of the darkness of unbelief, a title caught my eye and held it, “The Handwriting of God.”  I knew the book.  It had fallen into bad company, but its theology was unimpeachable.  It did not belong.  It—­

I opened it.  The Reverend Samuel Thaddeus had written his own name in it, in the cramped hand I had grown to know.  Evidently its presence there was accidental.  I turned it over in my hands, and saw that it was closed down on something, on several things, indeed.  They proved to be a small black note-book, a pair of spectacles, a woman’s handkerchief.

I stood there looking at them.  They might mean nothing but the accidental closing of a book, which was mistakenly placed in bad company, perhaps by Mrs. Graves.  I was inclined to doubt her knowledge of religious literature.  Or they might mean something more, something I had feared to find.

Armed with the volume, and the lemon forgotten—­where the cook found it the next day and made much of the mystery—­I went upstairs again.

Viewed in a strong light, the three articles took on real significance.  The spectacles I fancied were Miss Emily’s.  They were, to all appearances, the duplicates of those on her tidy bedside stand.  But the handkerchief was not hers.  Even without the scent, which had left it, but clung obstinately to the pages of the book, I knew it was not hers.  It was florid, embroidered, and cheap.  And held close to the light, I made out a laundry-mark in ink on the border.  The name was either Wright or Knight.

The note-book was an old one, and covered a period of almost twenty years.  It contained dates and cash entries.  The entries were nearly all in the Reverend Samuel Thaddeus’s hand, but after the date of his death they had been continued in Miss Emily’s writing.  They varied little, save that the amounts gradually increased toward the end, and the dates were further apart.  Thus, in 1898 there were six entries, aggregating five hundred dollars.  In 1902-1903 there were no entries at all, but in 1904 there was a single memorandum of a thousand dollars.  The entire amount must have been close to twenty-five thousand dollars.  There was nothing to show whether it was money saved or money spent, money paid out or come in.

But across the years 1902 and 1903, the Reverend Thaddeus had written diagonally the word “Australia.”  There was a certain amount of enlightenment there.  Carlo Benton had been in Australia during those years.  In his “Fifty Years in Bolivar County,” the father had rather naively quoted a letter from Carlo Benton in Melbourne.  A record, then, in all probability, of sums paid by this harassed old man to a worthless son.