loss, for he had been right in guessing that the chamber was not
empty. It contained objects which, whether precious or not, had at
any rate been worth somebody's hiding. These objects were a
collection of small fiat parcels, of the shape of packets of letters,
wrapped in white paper and neatly sealed. The seals, mechanically
figured, bore the impress neither of arms nor of initials; the paper
looked old--it had turned faintly sallow; the packets might have been
there for ages. Baron counted them--there were nine in all, of
different sizes; he turned them over and over, felt them curiously
and snuffed in their vague, musty smell, which affected him with the
melancholy of some smothered human accent. The little bundles were
neither named nor numbered--there was not a word of writing on any of
the covers; but they plainly contained old letters, sorted and
matched according to dates or to authorship. They told some old,
dead story--they were the ashes of fires burned out.

As Peter Baron held his discoveries successively in his hands he
became conscious of a queer emotion which was not altogether elation
and yet was still less pure pain. He had made a find, but it somehow
added to his responsibility; he was in the presence of something
interesting, but (in a manner he couldn't have defined) this
circumstance suddenly constituted a danger. It was the perception of
the danger, for instance, which caused to remain in abeyance any
impulse he might have felt to break one of the seals. He looked at
them all narrowly, but he was careful not to loosen them, and he
wondered uncomfortably whether the contents of the secret compartment
would be held in equity to be the property of the people in the
King's Road. He had given money for the davenport, but had he given
money for these buried papers? He paid by a growing consciousness
that a nameless chill had stolen into the air the penalty, which he