No, that was nonsense.  Potts had lived with shadows until he believed in shadows that came out of his own imagination and into it returned again.  Still, she was a woman of some sort, and apparently she had a lover or a husband, a man with a great fair beard.  How at this date, which must have been remote, did a golden-bearded man come to foregather with a woman who wore such robes and ornaments as these?  And that sword hilt, worn smooth by handling and with an amber knob?  Whence came it?  To my mind—­this was before expert examination confirmed my view—­it looked very Norse.  I had read the Sagas and I remembered a tale recovered in them of some bold Norsemen who about the years eight or nine hundred had wandered to the coast of what is known now to be America—­I think a certain Eric was their captain.  Could the fair-haired man in the grave have been one of these?

Thus I speculated before I looked at the pile of parchments so evidently prepared from sheep skins by one who had only a very rudimentary knowledge of how to work such stuff, not knowing that in those parchments was hid the answer to many of my questions.  To these I turned last of all, for we all shrink from parchments; their contents are generally so dull.  There was a great bundle of them that had been lashed together with a kind of straw rope, fine straw that reminded me of that used to make Panama hats.  But this had rotted underneath together with all the bottom part of the parchments, many sheets of them, of which only fragments remained, covered with dry mould and crumbling.  Therefore the rope was easy to remove and beneath it, holding the sheets in place, was only some stout and comparatively modern string—­it had a red thread in it that marked it as navy cord of an old pattern.

I slipped these fastenings off and lifted a blank piece of skin set upon the top.  Beneath appeared the first sheet of parchment, closely, very closely covered with small “black-letter” writing, so faint and faded that even if I were able to read black-letter, which I cannot, of it I could have made nothing at all.  The thing was hopeless.  Doubtless in that writing lay the key to the mystery, but it could never be deciphered by me or any one else.  The lady with the eyes like a deer had appeared to old Potts in vain; in vain had she bidden him to hand over this manuscript to me.

So I thought at the time, not knowing the resources of science.  Afterwards, however, I took that huge bundle to a friend, a learned friend whose business in life it was and is, to deal with and to decipher old manuscripts.

“Looks pretty hopeless,” he said, after staring at these.  “Still, let’s have a try; one never knows till one tries.”

Then he went to a cupboard in his muniment room and produced a bottle full of some straw-coloured fluid into which he dipped an ordinary painting brush.  This charged brush he rubbed backwards and forwards over the first lines of the writing and waited.  Within a minute, before my astonished eyes, that faint, indistinguishable script turned coal-black, as black as though it had been written with the best modern ink yesterday.