ht him suddenly a sense of possession which he had not been able
to feel when Sherrill had told him the house was his; it brought an
impulse of protection of these things about him. Who had been
searching in Benjamin Corvet's--in Alan's house? He pushed the drawers
shut hastily and hurried across the hall to the room opposite. In this
room--plainly Benjamin Corvet's bedroom--were no signs of intrusion.
He went to the door of the room connecting with it, turned on the
light, and looked in. It was a smaller room than the others and
contained a roll-top desk and a cabinet. The cover of the desk was
closed, and the drawers of the cabinet were shut and apparently
undisturbed. Alan recognized that probably in this room he would find
the most intimate and personal things relating to his father; but
before examining it, he turned back to inspect the bedroom.

It was a carefully arranged and well-cared-for room, plainly in
constant use. A reading stand, with a lamp, was beside the bed with a
book marked about the middle. On the dresser were hair-brushes and a
comb, and a box of razors, none of which were missing. When Benjamin
Corvet had gone away, he had not taken anything with him, even toilet
articles. With the other things on the dresser, was a silver frame for
a photograph with a cover closed and fastened over the portrait; as
Alan took it up and opened it, the stiffness of the hinges and the
edges of the lid gummed to the frame by disuse, showed that it was long
since it had been opened. The picture was of a woman of perhaps
thirty--a beautiful woman, dark-haired, dark-eyed, with a refined,
sensitive, spiritual-looking face. The dress she wore was the same,
Alan suddenly recognized, which he had seen and touched among the
things in the chest of drawers; it gave him a queer feeling now to have
touched her things. He felt instinctively, as he held the picture and
studied it, that it could have been no vulgar bickering between wife
and husband, nor any caprice of a dissatisfied woman, that had made her
separate herself from her husband. The photographer's name was stamped
in one corner, and the date--1894, the year after Alan had been born.

But Alan felt that the picture and the condition of her rooms across
the hall did not shed any light on the relations between her and
Benjamin Corvet; rather they obscured them; for his father neither had
put the picture away from him and devoted her rooms to other uses, nor