“Do you think you could show me those slips?”

“I do not suppose any one has touched them.”

“Then, my dear young lady, you would confer a great favour on me if you would allow Mr. Belamour and myself to escort you to Delavie and show us these papers.  I fear it may be alarming and distressing.”

“Oh no, sir, I know no harm can happen to me where Mr. Belamour is,” she said, smiling.

“It may be very important,” he said, and she went to put on her hood.

“Surely,” said Mr. Wayland, “the title-deeds cannot have been left there?”

“No.  The title-deeds to the main body of the property are at Hargrave’s.  I have seen them, at the time of my brother’s marriage; but still this may be what was wanting.”

“Yet the sending this child to search is presumption that no such document existed.”

“Of course no one supposed it did,” said Mr. Wayland, on the defence again.

Aurelia was quickly ready in her little hood and kerchief, and trim high-heeled shoes.  She was greatly surprised to find how near she had been to her friends during these last few days of her captivity, and when Madge obeyed the summons to the door, the old woman absolutely smiled to see her safe, and the little terrier danced about her in such transports that she begged to take him back with her.

She opened the door of the little empty book room, where nothing stood except the old bureau.  That, she said, had been full of letters, but all the oldest things had been within a door opening in the wainscot, which she should never have found had not Bob pushed it open in his search for rats, and then she found a tin case full of papers and parchments, much older, she thought, than the letters.  She had tied them up together, and easily produced them.

Mr. Wayland handed them to Mr. Belamour, whose legal eye was better accustomed to crabbed old documents.  A conversation that had begun on the way about Fay and Letty was resumed, and interested both their father and Aurelia so much that they forgot to be impatient, until Mr. Belamour looked up from his examination, saying, “This is what was wanting.  Here is a grant in the 12th year of Henry III. to Guglielmus ab Vita and the heirs male of his body to the Manor, lying without the city of Carminster, and here are three wills of successive lords of Delavie expressly mentioning heirs male.  Now the deeds that I have seen do not go beyond 1539, when Henry Delavie had a grant of the Grange and lands belonging to Carminster Abbey—­ the place, in fact, where the Great House stands, and there is in that no exclusion of female heirs.  But the Manor house can certainly be proved to be entailed in the male line alone, according to what was, I believe, the tradition of the family.”

“There is no large amount of property involved, I fear,” said Mr. Wayland.

“There is an old house, much out of repair, and a few farms worth, may be, 200 pounds a year, a loss that will not be material to you, sir, I hope.”