'To find out, I am afraid you must give them your attention. They are like witnesses, stepping out from the darkness of the past and telling the history of it--history in which they moved and had a part, you understand.' 'But the history of the past is not so delightful, is it, that one would care much about hearing the witnesses? What is in that other cabinet, where you are standing?' 'That contains my herbarium.' 'All that? You don't mean that all those drawers are filled with dried flowers?' 'Pretty well filled. There is room for some more.' 'How you must have worked!' 'That was play.' 'Then what do you call work?' 'Well, reading law rather comes into that category.' 'You expect to go on reading law?' 'For the present. I approve of finishing things when they are begun.' 'Mr. Dallas, what are you going to _do?_ In what, after all, are you going to be unlike other men? Your mother seems to apprehend some disastrous and mysterious change in all your prospects; I cannot see the necessity of that. In what are you going to be other than she wishes you to be? Are not her fears mistaken?' Pitt smiled a grave smile; again stopped in his work and stood opposite her. 'I might say "yes" and "no,"' he answered. 'I do not expect to have a red cross embroidered on my sleeve, like the old crusaders. But judge yourself. Can those who live to do the will of God be just like those whose one concern is to do their own will?' 'Mr. Dallas, you insinuate, or your words might be taken to insinuate, that all the rest of us are in the latter class!' 'Whose will do you do?' he said. There was no answer, for Betty had too much pluck to speak falsely, and too much sense not to know what was truth. She accordingly did not say anything, and after waiting a minute or two Pitt went on with his preparations, locking up drawers, packing up boxes, taking down and putting away the many objects that filled the room. There was not a little work of this sort to be done, and he went on with it busily, and with an evidently trained and skilled hand. 'Then, after finishing with law, do you expect to come back here and unpack all these pretty things again?' she said finally. 'Perhaps. I do not know.' 'Perhaps you will settle in England?' 'I do not yet know what is the work that I have to do in the world. I _shall_ know, but I do not know now. It may be to go to India, or to Greenland; or it may be to come here. Though I do not now see what I should do in Seaforth that would be worth living for.' India or Greenland! For a young man who was heir to no end of money, and would have acres of land! Miss Betty perceived that here was something indeed very different from the general run of rich young men, and that Mrs. Dallas had not been so far wrong in her forebodings. 'How very absurd!' she said to herself as she went away down the open staircase; 'and what a pity!' CHAPTER XXXIX. _SKIRMISHING_.