She went up to her room when she left him. It was a little room in the second story, and she had become fond of it. She often sat alone there. She had been sitting at its window when Rachel Ffrench had driven by in the afternoon. The window was still open she saw as she entered, and a gust of wind passing through it had scattered several light articles about the floor. She went to pick them up. They were principally loose papers, and as she bent to raise the first one she discovered that it was yellow with age and covered with a rough drawing of some mechanical appliance. Another and another presented the same plan--drawn again and again, elaborately and with great pains at times, and then hastily as if some new thought had suggested itself. On several were written dates, and on others a few words. She was endeavoring to decipher some of these faintly written words when a fresh gust of rising wind rushed past her as she stood, and immediately there fell upon her ear a slight ghostly rustle. Near her was a small unused closet whose door had been thrown open, and as she turned toward it there fluttered from one of the shelves a sheet of paper yellower than the rest. She picked it up and read the words written upon the back of the drawing. They had been written twenty-six years before. "To-day the child was born. It is a boy. By the time he is a year old my work will be done." The girl's heart began to beat quickly. The papers rustled again, and a kind of fear took possession of her. "_He_ wrote it," she said aloud. "The man who is dead--who is _dead_; and it was not finished at all." She closed the window, eager to shut out the wind; then she closed the door and went back to the papers. Her fancies concerning Stephen Murdoch had taken very definite shape from the first. She knew two things of him; that he had been gentle and unworldly, and that he had cherished throughout his life a hope which had eluded him until death had come between him and his patient and unflagging labor. The sight of the yellow faded papers moved her to powerful feeling. She had never had a friend; she had stood alone from her earliest childhood, and here was a creature who had been desolate too--who must have been desolate, since he had been impelled to write the simple outcome of his thoughts again and again upon the paper he wrought on, as if no human being had been near to hear. It was this which touched her most of all. There was scarcely a sheet upon which some few words were not written. Each new plan bore its date, and some hopeful or weary thought. He had been tired often, but never faithless to his belief. The end was never very far off. A few days, one more touch, would bring it,--and then he had forgotten all the past. "I can afford to forget it," he said once. "It only seems strange now that it should have lasted so long when so few steps remain to be taken."