"What is the meaning of this?" "I dursn't tell you, sir; oh, sir, my heart be gone with the sorrow of it all, but if you wish, I will bring the book that he was always a-writing in for these months past." "Yes, get the book, please, at once: no thank you, nothing to eat yet, I wish to see the book first." He went, and returned with a large, old-fashioned common-place book, the leaves of which were covered with writing. It was a woman's hand. I took it down stairs, and went with it into the garden. There, on a seat in the middle of an old Dutch garden, very prim, very silent, where the sunlight fell upon the faces of the amber and purple pansies, and the great white carnations shook their ruffles to the wind with a dreamy and seventeenth century air, I sat and read this story, written by the hand of a dead cavalier who craves, through me, your sympathy for his deathless sorrow. THE BOOK CHAPTER I I DESCRIBE MYSELF I cannot tell you my story unless I tell you who I am and what I am. Oh, it is not for pleasure that I am writing all this down, but just because I--must. My name is Beatrice Sinclair, and I am the last representative of an old and ruined family. There were Sinclairs in the time of King Charles who were great people at Court--you must accept the statement, for I cannot write much about this family of mine, the very thought of it fills me with a kind of horror. What would all those men with long flowing hair, those women with patches on their faces,--what would they say if they could see me, the last of their race, and could know what I have been? Perhaps you guess what I mean, perhaps you are sneering at me; you can do so if you please, for I am so very ill that I care for nothing now, and they say I am dying. I know now, oh, I know well why an animal crawls away and hides itself to die: though I am only twenty-three I know more about death than those Egyptians who have been shut up in pyramids alone with him for a thousand years. From the window where I am sitting now, wrapped up in shawls, I can see the garden; the frost has gone, and I can see a yellow crocus that has pushed its head up through the dark, stiff mould. If it knew what I know of life, it would draw that head back. You must think me a very gloomy person, and indeed just now I am, for I am thinking of a part of my history of which I shall not speak, but only hint. Some time, no matter how long ago, I was living at the Bath Hotel. I had plenty of clothes and money, and I thought I was in love. Well, one day I found myself deserted, I found a letter on the breakfast table enclosing a blue strip of paper--a cheque for two hundred pounds. I did not scream and tear my hair as a girl I know said she did when she was deserted, I believe I laughed.