The envelope contained only a few lines, but enclosed in it there was a little bunch of keys, with every one of which the young man was familiar. He took them up with a sigh, and looked at them one by one, almost as tenderly as he had looked at the books. The commonest object in that chamber had its association for him,--and with every such association, the grief which he had tried so hard to put away from him took possession of him anew. There was a ponderous, old-fashioned mahogany desk on a side-table, and it was in this desk that the lonely inhabitant of the room had been accustomed to keep her letters and papers, together with those few valueless relics--that pitiful jetsam and flotsam from the shipwreck of hope and happiness which are left to the most desolate creature. Eustace unlocked and opened the desk as softly as if his mother had been sleeping near him. He had often seen her seated at this desk; he had once surprised her in tears, with a little packet of letters in her hand, but he had never seen the contents of any of those discoloured papers, tied with faded ribbons, and disfigured by obsolete postmarks. And now that she was gone, it was his duty to examine those papers,--or so he considered. Yet there was a shade of compunction in his mind as he touched the first packet, and he felt as if he had been committing a sacrilege. The first packet was labelled “My Mother’s Letters,” and contained the epistles of some good womanly creature, written to a daughter who was away at boarding-school. They were full of allusions to a comfortable middle-class household--a tradesman’s household, as it seemed, for there were occasional references to events that had occurred in the shop, and to “my dear husband’s over-exerting himself in the business,” and to “Daniel’s unsettled ways and indisposition to take to his father’s occupation.” Eustace smiled faintly as he read of poor Daniel, whose unsettled ways had been notorious before Sir Rowland Hill’s post-office amendments, and who remained unsettled in these latter days of electric telegraphy and labyrinthine railway cuttings.