and envelopes, and ink and blotting-paper, all ready, if some
day, by a miracle--who could tell?--she might steal into that room and
want to leave a message. There should be fresh flowers for her to find
there too if she did come.

And that new edition of Scott which was not finished issuing when she
went away, she would find that complete when she came back. Her little
collection of fairy books too--she was sure to glance at that! and then
she would find two or three new ones there finer than any of the old
ones; alas! so many beautiful books kept coming out now that she
had gone.

Yet somehow she might see them, after all, if they were taken softly to
that little room and laid on that table altar. When it was quite sure
that no one was looking or listening, the shy soul might steal out of
the air and turn the pages with a sigh.

Just so some savage lover might bring gifts of fruit and coloured beads,
and bright plumed birds, to the grave of his dead love, for the future
anthropologist to draw his moral of the childishness of all human
idealisms.

One day, as Theophil had stolen quietly into that room on some such
votive errand, an impulse had come to him to open the drawer of the
desk. There might be some message for him there. Any writing of the dead
we have never read before is a message.

Among various odds and ends, he came first upon one of those little
tradesmen's account-books interleaved with bad blotting-paper in which
the housewife writes her orders week by week.

It was full of Jenny's writing, and though the entries were merely
weekly repetitions of the same string of groceries:--"2 lbs. of the
best tea," "6 lbs. loaf sugar," "6 nutmegs," and so on,--yet, "the hand
being hers," they made a record that could only be read through blinding
tears; and one page which bore a severe little note, to the effect that
the tea had been far from good of late, read almost like a personal
revelation.

Theophil kissed the page, and, replacing the book, took up another, and
his heart leapt to find it was a little diary.

He hesitated for a moment. It seemed wrong to read it, and yet he knew
that Jenny's soul held nothing she would not have shared with him, and
he was so hungry for a word from her though it were only a word out
of the past.

The entries were not many nor long, but it smote his heart to find how
large a space his name, his interests, his successes, filled there. The
entries of honour were little