presently engrossed by an experience which
interrupted the even tenor of her young life.

She had been, as she afterwards remembered, impressed with a nervous
restlessness one afternoon, which made it impossible for her to perform
her ordinary household duties, or even to indulge her favorite
recreation of reading or castle building. She wandered over the ship,
and, impelled by the same vague feeling of unrest, descended to the
lower deck and the forward bulkhead where she had discovered the open
hatch. It had not been again disturbed, nor was there any trace of
further exploration. A little ashamed, she knew not why, of revisiting
the scene of Mr. Renshaw's researches, she was turning back when she
noticed that the door which communicated with de Ferrieres's loft was
partly open. The circumstance was so unusual that she stopped before
it in surprise. There was no sound from within; it was the hour when
its queer occupant was always absent; he must have forgotten to lock
the door or it had been unfastened by other hands. After a moment of
hesitation she pushed it further open and stepped into the room.

By the dim light of two port-holes she could see that the floor was
strewn and piled with the contents of a broken bale of curled horse
hair, of which a few untouched bales still remained against the wall.
A heap of morocco skins, some already cut in the form of chair cushion
covers, and a few cushions unfinished and unstuffed lay in the light of
the ports, and gave the apartment the appearance of a cheap workshop.
A rude instrument for combing the horse hair, awls, buttons, and thread
heaped on a small bench showed that active work had been but recently
interrupted. A cheap earthenware ewer and basin on the floor, and a
pallet made of an open bale of horse hair, on which a ragged quilt and
blanket were flung, indicated that the solitary worker dwelt and slept
beside his work.

The truth flashed upon the young girl's active brain, quickened by
seclusion and fed by solitary books. She read with keen eyes the
miserable secret of her father's strange guest in the poverty-stricken
walls, in the mute evidences of menial handicraft performed in
loneliness and privation, in this piteous adaptation of an accident to
save the conscious shame of premeditated toil. She knew now why he had
stammeringly refused to receive her father's offer to buy back the
goods he had given him; she knew now how hardly gained was the pitt