f fit to be seen."

She rang the bell. The chambermaid answered it, ready to show the other
rooms. She turned round at the door.

"Let's try to make our sitting-room look like home," she suggested.
"How dismal, how dreadfully like a thing that doesn't belong to us, that
empty table looks! Put some of your books and my keepsakes on it, while
I am away. I'll bring my work with me when I come back."

He had left his travelers' bag on a chair, when he first came in. Now
that he was alone, and under no restraint, he sighed as he unlocked
the bag. "Home?" he repeated; "we have no home. Poor girl! poor unhappy
girl! Let me help her to deceive herself."

He opened the bag. The little fragile presents, which she called her
"keepsakes," had been placed by her own hands in the upper part of the
bag, so that the books should not weigh on them, and had been carefully
protected by wrappings of cotton wool. Taking them out, one by one,
Herbert found a delicate china candlestick (intended to hold a wax
taper) broken into two pieces, in spite of the care that had been taken
to preserve it. Of no great value in itself, old associations made the
candlestick precious to Sydney. It had been broken at the stem and could
be easily mended so as to keep the accident concealed. Consulting the
waiter, Herbert discovered that the fracture could be repaired at the
nearest town, and that the place would be within reach when he went out
for a walk. In fear of another disaster, if he put it back in the bag,
he opened a drawer in the table, and laid the two fragments carefully
inside, at the further end. In doing this, his hand touched something
that had been already placed in the drawer. He drew it out, and found
that it was a book--the same book that Mrs. Presty (surely the evil
genius of the family again!) had hidden from Randal's notice, and had
forgotten when she left the hotel.

Herbert instantly recognized the gilding on the cover, imitated from a
design invented by himself. He remembered the inscription, and yet he
read it again:

"To dear Catherine, from Herbert, on the anniversary of our marriage."

The book dropped from his hand on the table, as if it had been a new
discovery, torturing him with a new pain.

His wife (he persisted in thinking of her as his wife) must have
occupied the room--might perhaps have been the person whom he had
succeeded, as a guest at the hotel. Did she still value his present to
her, in remembrance of o