Page:Fletcher - The Mortover Grange Affair.pdf/32

 Mrs. Creech conducted him to the second floor back and turned on the gas. A bed sitting-room; nothing in or about it at first sight to distinguish it from a thousand similar London lodging-house rooms of its sort, except that a recess was fitted with shelves and filled with books, and that a desk in the window was crowded with books and papers. The landlady looked round it with obvious satisfaction.

"A very comfortable room this is," she said.

"Mr. Wraypoole, he partly furnished it himself. That chair there, he said, once belonged to King George the Fourth, and that what he sat to write in was a real, genuine Chippendale. And the pictures on the walls were his."

Wedgwood saw at once that any examination of the desk and its papers would have to be put off till another day. He glanced at the books in the recess—they were all of an archæological or genealogical nature. The pictures were all old prints; one of some size, over the mantelpiece was a fine old copperplate; out of sheer curiosity Wedgwood read the lettering beneath it—Netherwell Church, Derbyshire.

"Was there no one about here that Mr. Wraypoole associated with?" he asked suddenly. "No one who knew him?"

Mrs. Creech shook her head.

"I couldn't say that there was, mister," she