I suspected he was
making his own inquiries about dates, but I put no questions to him.
On Monday evening, the thirteenth, that dear unfortunate Jarber came,
punctual to the appointed time. He looked so terribly harassed, that he
was really quite a spectacle of feebleness and fatigue. I saw, at a
glance, that the question of dates had gone against him, that Mr. Magsman
had not been the last tenant of the House, and that the reason of its
emptiness was still to seek.
"What I have gone through," said Jarber, "words are not eloquent enough
to tell. O Sophonisba, I have begun another series of discoveries!
Accept the last two as stories laid on your shrine; and wait to blame me
for leaving your curiosity unappeased, until you have heard Number
Three."
Number Three looked like a very short manuscript, and I said as much.
Jarber explained to me that we were to have some poetry this time. In
the course of his investigations he had stepped into the Circulating
Library, to seek for information on the one important subject. All the
Library-people knew about the House was, that a female relative of the
last tenant, as they believed, had, just after that tenant left, sent a
little manuscript poem to them which she described as referring to events
that had actually passed in the House; and which she wanted the
proprietor of the Library to publish.
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