During the days that had elapsed, even Mr Apjohn himself had lost something of his confidence. If any further step was to be taken, why did not the young lady's father himself come and take it? Why had he been so dilatory in a matter which was of so much greater importance to himself than to any one else? But now the two attorneys were together, and it was necessary that they should decide upon doing something,--or nothing.
"I hoped you would have been here last week," said Mr Apjohn.
"I couldn't get away. There were things I couldn't possibly leave."
"Of course it is important,--of most vital importance,--if there be any hope."
"I have told you exactly what I think and feel."
"Yes, yes. I know how much more than kind, how honourable you have been in all this matter. You still think that the will is hidden?"
"I can hardly say that either," said Mr Apjohn. "There was ground on which to form my opinion, and I do not know that there is any ground for changing it. But in such a matter the mind will vacillate. I did think that he had found the will shut up in a volume of sermons, in a volume which his uncle had been reading during his illness, and that he had left the book in its place upon the shelf. That, you will say, is a conclusion too exact for man to reach without anything in the shape of absolute evidence."
"I do not say so; but then as yet I hardly know the process by which that belief has been reached."
"But I say so;--I say that is too exact. There is more of imagination in it than of true deduction. I certainly should not recommend another person to proceed far on such reasoning. You see it has been in this way." Then he explained to his brother attorney the process of little circumstances by which he had arrived at his own opinion;--the dislike of the man to leave the house, his clinging to one room, his manifest possession of a secret as evinced by his conversations with Farmer Griffith, his continual dread of something, his very clinging to Llanfeare as a residence which would not have been the case had he destroyed the will, his exaggerated fear of the coming cross-examination, his ready assertion that he had destroyed nothing and hidden nothing,--but his failure to reply when he was asked whether he was aware of any such concealment. Then the fact that the books had not been searched themselves, that the old Squire had never personally used the room, but had used a book or one or two books which had been taken from it; that these books had been volumes which had certainly been close to him in those days when the lost will was being written. All these and other little details known to the reader made the process by which Mr Apjohn had arrived at the conclusion which he now endeavoured to explain to Mr Brodrick.