“I am delirious? You are fibbing, my cock-sparrow! So I am strange? You find me curious, do you?”

“Yes, curious.”

“Shall I tell you what I was reading about, what I was looking for? See what a lot of papers I’ve made them bring me. Suspicious, eh?”

“Well, what is it?”

“You prick up your ears?”

“How do you mean — ’prick up my ears’?”

“I’ll explain that afterwards, but now, my boy, I declare to you... no, better ‘I confess’... No, that’s not right either; ‘I make a deposition and you take it.’ I depose that I was reading, that I was looking and searching...”