After copying these two entries, I went out into the churchyard to look for Mary Haygarth's grave.

Under a fine old yew—which had been old a hundred years ago, it seems—I found huddled amongst other headstones one so incrusted with moss, that it was only after scraping the parasite verdure from the stone with my penknife that I was able to discover the letters that had been cut upon it. I found at last a brief inscription:

"Here lieth ye body of MARY HAYGARTH, aged 27. Born 1727. Died 1754. This stone has been set up by one who sorroweth without hope of consolation." A strange epitaph: no scrap of Latin, no text from Scripture, no conventional testimony to the virtues and accomplishments of the departed, no word to tell whether the dead woman had been maid, wife, or widow. It was the most provoking inscription for a lawyer or a genealogist, but such as might have pleased a poet.

I fancy this Mary Haygarth must have been some quiet creature, with very few friends to sorrow for her loss; perhaps only that one person who sorrowed without hope of consolation.

Such a tombstone might have been set above the grave of that simple maid who dwelt "beside the banks of Dove."

This is the uttermost that my patience or ingenuity can do for me at Spotswold. I have exhausted every possibility of obtaining further information. So, having written and posted my report to Sheldon, I have no more to do but to return to Ullerton. I take back with me nothing but the copy of the two entries in the register of burials. Who this Matthew Haygarth or this Mary Haygarth was, and how related to the Matthew, is an enigma not to be solved at Spotswold.

Here the story of the Haygarths ends with the grave under the yew-tree.

BOOK THE FIFTH - RELICS OF THE DEAD

*

Chapter I - Betrayed by a Blotting-Pad

*

At an early hour upon the day on which Valentine Hawkehurst telegraphed to his employer, Philip Sheldon presented himself again at the dingy door of the office in Gray's Inn.

The dingy door was opened by the still more dingy boy; and Mr. Sheldon the elder—who lived in a state of chronic hurry, and had a hansom cab in attendance upon him at almost every step of his progress through life—was aggravated by the discovery that his brother was out.

"Out!" he repeated, with supreme disgust; "he always is out, I think. Where is he to be found?"

The boy replied that his master would be back in half an hour, if Mr. Sheldon would like to wait.

"Like to wait!" cried the stockbroker; "when will lawyers' clerks have sense enough to know that nobody on this earth ever liked to wait? Where's your master gone?"