Cowell Devlin’s discovery and concealment of the deed of gift turns a scrap of nearly lost paper into a consequential secret. The document records Emery Staines’s promise of £2,000 to Anna Wetherell, witnessed by Crosbie Wells, but it is legally incomplete: Staines has not signed it. Devlin recognizes the defect and hides the deed anyway, withholding it from others until he gives it to Anna on January 27. The episode makes the paper’s uncertain legal force inseparable from the moral significance of its suppression.

Discovery in Wells’s cottage

The discovery takes place after Crosbie Wells’s body has been removed from his isolated cottage. The room’s neglect is palpable: dusty surfaces, a mouldy pillow, greasy-dry bacon hanging from a rafter, and empty liquor demijohns encircling the space. As Devlin kneels by the range to build a fire, he opens the ash drawer and finds a document caught between the grate and the drawer’s bottom. It appears someone tried to burn it, but the paper caught only along one edge before falling out of the firebox. Devlin brushes away the ash and finds it still legible.

The deed is dated October 11, 1865. It states that Staines is to give Anna, formerly of New South Wales, £2,000, with Wells presiding as witness. Wells’s name bears a shaky signature; the space beside Staines’s name is blank. Devlin immediately understands that the document is invalid because the witness has signed before the principal, who has not signed at all. The paper therefore records a proposed gift, not a completed legal transfer.

The concealment

Devlin recognizes Anna’s name: she is the woman admitted to the gaol-house the previous night, unconscious and drugged with opium after an apparent suicide attempt. He pauses, frowns, folds the deed, and slips it between the buttons of his shirt against his skin. He then resumes building the fire without telling Dr. Gillies, who has been outside tending the horses. The two men share tea by the window and leave the cottage with Wells’s body, while the hidden document travels back with Devlin.

Devlin cannot settle on a clear account of why he concealed it. He considers whether the quiet atmosphere of Wells’s house moved him, whether suppressing the paper was a kind of respect for the dead, or whether Anna’s name stirred an obscure wish to protect her. These remain conjectures rather than a stated motive. The narration presents his uncertainty as characteristic: rather than attach himself to a precise explanation for questionable conduct, he drifts among possible explanations and avoids confession. He considers telling Governor Shepard after returning to the Police Camp, but a new commotion distracts him as Anna begins to revive.

A document that changes hands late

The deed remains concealed for a fortnight. Devlin does not disclose it during that interval; he keeps it close, then later between the pages of his Bible. On January 27, he takes it from the Bible and gives it to Anna in a private parlour. She is nearly illiterate and initially struggles to make sense of the writing, but recognizes that she can decipher it. The delayed handover gives her access to evidence of Staines’s intended gift while leaving the deed’s original defect intact: the missing signature has not been supplied.

The document matters not simply because it names a substantial sum, but because it offers a possible connection between Anna and Staines at a time when his whereabouts and the fate of his fortune are uncertain. Elsewhere in the tangled gold story, approximately £4,000 had been sewn into five dresses by Lydia Wells, while gold taken from the dresses was moved, melted, and stamped as Aurora gold. Anna later discovers the gold remaining in her orange gown after waking in gaol with a twelve-hour memory gap. These movements of wealth provide the broader context for the deed, but they do not make it valid or establish that its promised £2,000 was paid.

Consequences and significance

The concealment delays Anna’s discovery of the written promise and keeps a potentially relevant piece of evidence outside the authorities’ knowledge. Its later return also places Devlin’s private scruples beside his public conduct: he has withheld the document, yet his self-conception as a virtuous man remains intact. The episode thus presents secrecy not as a single, fully explained scheme, but as an act whose author evades a settled account of his own reasons.

The deed’s language of giving sits uneasily alongside the novel’s surrounding arrangements of debt, commissions, and disputed claims. Later, Charlie Frost proposes that Staines assume Anna’s debt to Dick Mannering and have it repaid from Staines’s share of the bonanza, so she will have money while he is in gaol. That proposed payment is distinct from the unsigned deed Devlin found: it shows another effort to turn the uncertain fortune into practical support for Anna, without resolving the deed’s legal status. The paper’s journey—from a failed attempt to burn it, to Devlin’s shirt and Bible, and finally into Anna’s hands—makes its physical survival a measure of how long a promise can remain hidden before it is allowed to matter.