’I was putting something in the master’s coffin he told me to put there.’

‘What was it?’ he asked, very sharp and sudden.

‘How should I know?’ says I.  ’It’s in a case.  It may be some old letter or a lock of hair as belonged to your mother.’

‘Come into my room,’ he said, and I followed him in.  He looked very pale and anxious, and when he’d shut the door he spoke—­

’Look here, Nelly, I’m going to trust you.  My father was very angry with me about some little follies of mine, and he told me the other night he had left a good slice of the estate away from me.  Do you think that packet you put in the coffin had anything to do with it?’

‘Good Lord, bless your soul, sir, no,’ I said.  ’That was no will or lawyer’s letters, it was but some little token of remembrance he set store by.’

‘Thanks, Nelly, that was all I wanted to know.’

No one ever knows who tells these things, but it had leaked out somehow that that slice of the estate was to belong to young Robert the gamekeeper, and you may be sure the tongues went wagging above a bit.  But it seemed to me, if it was so, my master was right to make a proper provision for Robert as well as for Jasper.  However, nobody could be sure of anything until after the funeral.

The doctor was staying in the house, and master’s younger brother, besides the lawyer and young Master Jasper; so I had many things to see to, and ought to have been tired enough to get to sleep easy the night before he was buried.  But somehow I couldn’t sleep.  I couldn’t help thinking of my master as I had known him all these years.  Him being always so gentle and so kind, and so light-hearted, it didn’t seem likely he could have had young Robert on his conscience all the time; and yet what was I to think?  And then my poor Jasper—­I say ‘poor,’ but I never loved and pitied him less than I did that night.  He had lost such a father, and he could go troubling about whether he had got the whole estate or not.  So I lay awake, and I thought of the coffin lying between its burning tapers in the great bedroom, and I wished they had not screwed him down, for then I could have gone, late as it was, and had another look at my master’s face.  And as I lay it seemed to me that I heard a door opened, and then a step, and then a key turned.  Now, the master never locked his door, so the key of that room turned rusty in the lock, and before I had time to think more than that I was out of bed and in my dressing-gown, creeping along the passage.  Sure enough, my master’s door was open, as I saw by the streak of light across the corridor.  I walked softly on my bare feet, and no one could have heard me go along the thick carpet.  When I got to the door, I saw that what I had been trying not to think of was really true.  Master Jasper was there taking the screws out of his father’s coffin to see what was in that green leather case.

I stood there and looked.  I could not have moved, not for the Queen’s crown, if it had been offered me then and there.  One after another he took the screws out and laid them on the little bedside table, where the master used to keep his pistols of a night.  When all the screws was out he lifted the lid in both his arms and set it on the bed, where it lay looking like another coffin.  Then he began to search for what I had put in beside his father.