It was nearly three o’clock, long past the usual hour for luncheon. Mr. Piper passed the open doorway of the dining-room, through which he could see the table laid for the mid-day meal, with that modern elegance and glow of colour which Bella had substituted for the commonplace arrangements that had obtained before her time. He went upstairs with a heavy step, and walked straight to his wife’s boudoir. It was a gem of a room at the end of the corridor, with a large bow-window overlooking the garden, a room bright with all the luxuries and frivolities the second Mrs. Piper had accumulated during her brief reign, buhl, Sèvre, ormolu, tortoiseshell, ivory, malachite, celadon, turquoise, rose Du Barry, every colour and every substance, rosebud chintz, old lace, a carpet of velvet pile. Mr. Piper, standing at gaze and breathing his hardest, in the centre of this crowded toy-shop-room, looked very like the traditional bull in the china-shop, and an infuriated bull to boot. He had come there with a purpose, but for the moment he paused irresolute. He felt ashamed of himself for doubting his wife ever so little. The sight of this room reassured him. ‘Didn’t I give her every one of these things?’ he said to himself. ‘How can she help being fond of me?’ And then, just at that moment, his eye lighted upon something which he had not given her. A Parian statuette, on a black marble base, Danneker’s famous Ariadne. ‘No, I didn’t give her that,’ he said, ‘and it wasn’t among her wedding presents. That’s something from _him_.’ The table was covered with books. He took up one in cream-coloured calf, gilt edged, tooled, an exquisite specimen of Riviere’s binding--Alfred de Musset’s poems. On the fly-leaf there was a name written, a name that was almost strange to Mr. Piper, though his second wife had signed it in the marriage register. Isabel. Isabel, written in a bold masculine hand, beneath it a date, and two words in a language that Mr. Piper knew not. _Zum Gedächtniss._ He tossed the book aside, as if it were some reptile that had stung him, and went on with his investigation. In front of the window there stood an old Dutch escritoire, inlaid with many-coloured woods, a thing of numerous drawers and recesses, and quaint hiding-places, in which to keep secret store of money or documents. It might have been the joy of some Dutch housewife in days gone by, or the private treasury of some rich burgher, in the fat and fertile Low Countries, where life slides gently by in an unostentatious prosperity.