He determined with devoted ardour that when he found it he would make the worst possible use of it:  the worst, that is, for Laura.  As for consequences to himself, he was beyond them.  There is an Irish play in which an old woman finds that she no longer fears the sea when it has drowned the last of her sons; it can do nothing more to her.  Hedrick no longer feared anything.

The book was somewhere in Laura’s room, he knew that; and there were enough opportunities to search, though Laura had a way of coming in unexpectedly which was embarrassing; and he suffered from a sense of inadequacy when—­on the occasion of his first new attempt—­he answered the casual inquiry as to his presence by saying that he “had a headache.”  He felt there was something indirect in the reply; but Laura was unsuspicious and showed no disposition to be analytical.  After this, he took the precaution to bring a school-book with him and she often found the boy seated quietly by her west window immersed in study:  he said he thought his headaches came from his eyes and that the west light “sort of eased them a little.”

The ledger remained undiscovered, although probably there has never been a room more thoroughly and painstakingly searched, without its floor being taken up and its walls torn down.  The most mysterious, and, at the same time, the most maddening thing about it was the apparent simplicity of the task.  He was certain that the room contained the book:  listening, barefooted, outside the door at night, he had heard the pen scratching.  The room was as plain as a room can be, and small.  There was a scantily filled clothes-press; he had explored every cubic inch of it.  There was the small writing table with one drawer; it held only some note-paper and a box of pen-points.  There was a bureau; to his certain knowledge it contained no secret whatever.  There were a few giltless chairs, and a white “wash-stand,” a mere basin and slab with exposed plumbing.  Lastly, there was the bed, a very large and ugly “Eastlake” contrivance; he had acquired a close acquaintance with all of it except the interior of the huge mattress itself, and here, he finally concluded, must of necessity be the solution.  The surface of the mattress he knew to be unbroken; nevertheless the book was there.  He had recently stimulated his deductive powers with a narrative of French journalistic sagacity in a similar case; and he applied French reasoning.  The ledger existed.  It was somewhere in the room.  He had searched everything except the interior of the mattress.  The ledger was in that interior.

The exploration thus become necessary presented some difficulties.  Detection in the act would involve explanations hard to invent; it would not do to say he was looking for his knife; and he could not think of any excuse altogether free from a flavour of insincerity.  A lameness beset them all and made them liable to suspicion; and Laura, once suspicious, might be petty enough to destroy the book, and so put it out of his power forever.  He must await the right opportunity, and, after a racking exercise of patience, at last he saw it coming.