The next morning he went down to the family solicitor's office. He had
done so, off and on, for weeks. He spent the time in looking through old
family papers, fishing out ancient documents, partly out of curiosity,
partly from an unaccountable presentiment. He had been there about an
hour this morning when a clerk brought him a small box, which, he said,
had been found inside another box belonging to the Belward-Staplings, a
distant branch of the family. These had asked for certain ancient papers
lately, and a search had been made, with this result. The little box was
not locked, and the key was in it. How the accident occurred was not
difficult to imagine. Generations ago there had probably been a
conference of the two branches of the family, and the clerk had
inadvertently locked the one box within the other. This particular box
of the Belward-Staplings was not needed again. Gaston felt that here was
something. These hours spent among old papers had given him strange
sensations, had, on the one hand, shown him his heritage; but had also
filled him with the spirit of that by-gone time. He had grown further
away from the present. He had played his part as in a drama: his real
life was in the distant past and out in the land of the heathen.

Now he took out a bundle of papers with broken seals, and wound with a
faded tape. He turned the rich important parchments over in his hands.
He saw his own name on the outside of one: "Sir Gaston Robert Belward."
And there was added: "Bart." He laughed. Well, why not complete the
reproduction? He was an M. P.--why not a, Baronet? He knew how it was
done. There were a hundred ways. Throw himself into the arbitration
question between Canada and the United States: spend ten thousand pounds
of--his grandfather's--money on the Party? His reply to himself was
cynical: the game was not worth the candle. What had he got out of it
all? Money? Yes: and he enjoyed that--the power that it gave--
thoroughly. The rest? He knew that it did not strike as deep as it