When Leo was eighteen I moved back into my rooms, and entered him at my own College, and at twenty-one he took his degree—­a respectable degree, but not a very high one.  Then it was that I, for the first time, told him something of his own story, and of the mystery that loomed ahead.  Of course he was very curious about it, and of course I explained to him that his curiosity could not be gratified at present.  After that, to pass the time away, I suggested that he should get himself called to the Bar; and this he did, reading at Cambridge, and only going up to London to eat his dinners.

I had only one trouble about him, and that was that every young woman who came across him, or, if not every one, nearly so, would insist on falling in love with him.  Hence arose difficulties which I need not enter into here, though they were troublesome enough at the time.  On the whole, he behaved fairly well; I cannot say more than that.

And so the time went by till at last he reached his twenty-fifth birthday, at which date this strange and, in some ways, awful history really begins.

III

THE SHERD OF AMENARTAS

On the day preceding Leo’s twenty-fifth birthday we both journeyed to London, and extracted the mysterious chest from the bank where I had deposited it twenty years before.  It was, I remember, brought up by the same clerk who had taken it down.  He perfectly remembered having hidden it away.  Had he not done so, he said, he should have had difficulty in finding it, it was so covered up with cobwebs.

In the evening we returned with our precious burden to Cambridge, and I think that we might both of us have given away all the sleep we got that night and not have been much the poorer.  At daybreak Leo arrived in my room in a dressing-gown, and suggested that we should at once proceed to business.  I scouted the idea as showing an unworthy curiosity.  The chest had waited twenty years, I said, so it could very well continue to wait until after breakfast.  Accordingly at nine—­an unusually sharp nine—­we breakfasted; and so occupied was I with my own thoughts that I regret to state that I put a piece of bacon into Leo’s tea in mistake for a lump of sugar.  Job, too, to whom the contagion of excitement had, of course, spread, managed to break the handle off my Sevres china tea-cup, the identical one I believe that Marat had been drinking from just before he was stabbed in his bath.

At last, however, breakfast was cleared away, and Job, at my request, fetched the chest, and placed it upon the table in a somewhat gingerly fashion, as though he mistrusted it.  Then he prepared to leave the room.

“Stop a moment, Job,” I said.  “If Mr. Leo has no objection, I should prefer to have an independent witness to this business, who can be relied upon to hold his tongue unless he is asked to speak.”

“Certainly, Uncle Horace,” answered Leo; for I had brought him up to call me uncle—­though he varied the appellation somewhat disrespectfully by calling me “old fellow,” or even “my avuncular relative.”