ss Wrenn," she said, and it was
characteristic of her nature that she should assume my trustworthiness.
"If anything seems worth saving you can file it--but I'd rather die than
have to wade through all this."

They were mostly personal letters, and while I went on, carefully filing
them, I thought how absurd it was of people to preserve so many papers
that were entirely without value. Mr. Vanderbridge I had imagined to be
a methodical man, and yet the disorder of the desk produced a painful
effect on my systematic temperament. The drawers were filled with
letters evidently unsorted, for now and then I came upon a mass of
business receipts and acknowledgements crammed in among wedding
invitations or letters from some elderly lady, who wrote interminable
pale epistles in the finest and most feminine of Italian hands. That a
man of Mr. Vanderbridge's wealth and position should have been so
careless about his correspondence amazed me until I recalled the dark
hints Hopkins had dropped in some of her midnight conversations. Was it
possible that he had actually lost his reason for months after the death
of his first wife, during that year when he had shut himself alone with
her memory? The question was still in my mind when my eyes fell on the
envelope in my hand, and I saw that it was addressed to Mrs. Roger
Vanderbridge. So this explained, in a measure at least, the carelessness
and the disorder! The desk was not his, but hers, and after her death he
had used it only during those desperate months when he barely opened a
letter. What he had done in those long evenings when he sat alone here
it was beyond me to imagine. Was it any wonder that the brooding should
have permanently unbalanced his mind?

At the end of an hour I had sorted and filed the papers, with the
intention of asking Mrs. Vanderbridge if she wished me to destroy the
ones that seemed to be unimportant. The letters she had instructed me to
keep had not come to my hand, and I was about to give up the search for
them, when, in shaking the lock of one of the drawers, the door of a
secret compartment fell open and I discovered a dark object, which
crumbled and dropped apart when I touched it. Bending nearer, I saw that
the crumbled mass had once been a bunch of flowers, and that a streamer
of purple ribbon still held together the frail structure of wire and
stems. In this drawer some one had hidden a sacred treasure, and moved
by a sense of romance and adventure,