Mannering?' said Elizabeth in amazement. 'No,
indeed! I have never seen it.'
'Well, it's somewhere here,' said the Squire impatiently. 'I should
have thought in all your rummagings lately you must have come across
it. I took it away from those robbers, my old solicitors, and I
wasn't going to give it to the new man--don't trust him particularly
not to talk. So I locked it up here--somewhere. And I can't find
it.' And he began restlessly to open drawer after drawer, which
already contained piles of letters and documents, neatly and
systematically arranged, with the proper dockets and sub-headings,
by Elizabeth.
'Oh, it can't be there!' cried Elizabeth. 'I know everything in
those drawers. Surely it must be in the office?' By which she meant
the small and hideously untidy room on the ground floor into which
masses of papers of all dates, still unsorted, had been carted down
from London.
'It isn't in the office!' He was, she saw, on the brink of an
outburst. 'I put it somewhere in this room my own self! And I should
have thought by now you knew the geography of this place as well as
I do!'
Elizabeth raised her eyebrows, but said nothing.
Pages:
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122