And so the time went by till at last he reached his twenty-fifth
birthday, at which date this strange and, in some ways, awful history
really begins.



III

THE SHERD OF AMENARTAS

On the day preceding Leo's twenty-fifth birthday we both journeyed to
London, and extracted the mysterious chest from the bank where I had
deposited it twenty years before. It was, I remember, brought up by the
same clerk who had taken it down. He perfectly remembered having hidden
it away. Had he not done so, he said, he should have had difficulty in
finding it, it was so covered up with cobwebs.

In the evening we returned with our precious burden to Cambridge, and I
think that we might both of us have given away all the sleep we got that
night and not have been much the poorer. At daybreak Leo arrived in my
room in a dressing-gown, and suggested that we should at once proceed to
business. I scouted the idea as showing an unworthy curiosity. The chest
had waited twenty years, I said, so it could very well continue to wait
until after breakfast. Accordingly at nine--an unusually sharp nine--we
breakfasted; and so occupied was I with my own thoughts that I regret to
state that I put a piece of bacon into Leo's tea in mistake for a lump
of sugar. Job, too, to whom the contagion of excitement had, of course,
spread, managed to break the handle off my Sèvres china tea-cup, the
identical one I believe that Marat had been drinking from just before he