I put the figure down on the desk and picked up the journal, which turned out at the first glance to be written on the same kind of paper as the notebook I had inspected in the Hobson Room at All Saints’; it had perhaps lain originally between the same covers. The writing on these sheets had faded very markedly, to a kind of washed-out mid-brown, but was still quite readable. It was a thin sheaf of papers, no more than fourteen or fifteen in all, and the first dozen carried nothing but agonizingly vague injunctions to the unearther of the manuscript; stuff like

Bee not impatient: all things shall be deliver'd to
Thee in time. Put thyself under my Will, & though
Shalt see a great Wonder. Prepare; abstain from all
Spirituous Liquors & Cordials [here at least I had
already started to do my best to co-operate], take
Only such Wine & small Beer as many conduce to
Health. Bethink thee, that altho’ Philosophy be amiable
In herself, her Aspect is upon occasion full strange
& stern…

And so on. The only entry that stood out in any way from this kind of thing, inset from the margin as though to differentiate it, to mark it perhaps as a note from Underhill to himself (a type of communication I have shown I understand) rather than a memorandum to me, ran as follows:

The name, Fareham village. Cf. Fareham Haven
South-hamptonshire. No knowledge of this. Quasi,
Far Home, sc. Distant habitation, or, fair Home. Or,
From the Saxon & Grothick, feor, sc. Fear. So, feor-
Hame, quasi, the Place of Fear.

Whatever the rightness or wrongness of Underhill’s etymology, I found this making a kind of sense, the same kind as my conjecture about the derivation of the name of my house. But such theorizing belonged to an impossibly vast and remote field of thought; I put it by and went dispiritedly on through the journal. On its last leaf were half a dozen lines of writing, in a tumbling, scribbled hand barely recognizable as Underhill’s.

My time is nearer than I had thought. Dismiss
Thy servants at once; send all from home save thine
Own family. Go not abroad thyself see no one &
Keep thy chamber, that I may find thee alone when I
Come to thee. Have our small Friend of Silver by thee
AT ALL TIMES-or everything will be in vain, Now,
Fare well, until I shall return.

There was only one of these instructions that it would not be difficult to obey, but that one was evidently the most important. Unhesitatingly, unreasoningly and with revulsion, I picked up the figure and placed it in my left side coat pocket, where it made an ugly bulge. That was that; what now? Preparatory to gathering the papers together, I turned the last one over and laid it on top of the others, noticing as I did so that it bore a couple of lines of writing. They were in the firm, unhurried hand of the earlier pages, and read:

I will wait upon thee in my Parlous at twelve of
The clock, the night following thy Discovery. See thou
Art alone.

What made me stare and rise to my feet and start trembling was not the content of this message, but the quality of the ink: Dark blue or black, not faded at all, as if it had been put on paper that day. But how could that be?