"If I were not afraid of publicity, I should not be obliged to pay you a pound a week," he remarked, with pleasing candour, "since advertisements would get me more information in a week than you may scrape together in a twelvemonth. But I happen to know the danger of publicity, and that many a good thing has been snatched out of a man's hands just as he was working it into shape. I don't say that this could be done in my case; and you know very well that it could not be done, as I hold papers which are essential to the very first move in the business."

I perfectly understand the meaning of these remarks, and I am inclined to doubt the existence of those important papers. Suspicion is a fundamental principle in the Sheldon mind. My friend George trusts me because he is obliged to trust me—and only so far as he is obliged—and is tormented, more or less, by the idea that I may at any moment attempt to steal a march upon him.

But to return to his letter:

"I should recommend you to examine the registries of every town or village within, say, thirty miles of Huxter's Cross. If you find nothing in such registries, we must fall back upon the larger towns, beginning with Hull, as being nearest to our starting-point. The work will, I fear, be slow, and very expensive for me. I need scarcely again urge upon you the necessity of confining your outlay to the minimum, as you know that my affairs are desperate. It couldn't well be lower water than it is with me, in a pecuniary sense; and I expect every day to find myself aground.

"And now for my news. I have discovered the burial-place of Samuel Meynell, after no end of trouble, the details of which I needn't bore you with, since you are now pretty well up in that sort of work. I am thankful to say I have secured the evidence that settles for Samuel, and ascertained by tradition that he died unmarried. The onus probandi would fall upon any one purporting to be descended from the said Samuel, and we know how uncommonly difficult said person would find it to prove anything.

"So, having disposed of Samuel, I came back to London by the next mail; Calais, in the month of November, not being one of those wildly-gay watering-places which tempt the idler. I arrived just in time to catch this afternoon's post; and now I look impatiently to your Miss Charlotte Meynell, of Huxter's Cross.—Yours, &c. G.S."