Lady Chavasse came into the room rather abruptly: Sir Geoffry shut up the diary, and prepared to close and lock the desk. There was a disturbed, restless, anxious look on my lady's face: there was a far more anxious and bitter pain ever making havoc with her heart. "Why, Geoffry! have you got out _that_ old desk?" Sir Geoffry smiled as he carried it to its obscure place in a dark corner of the library. When he was about twelve years old, and they were passing through London, he went to the Lowther Arcade and bought this desk, for which he had been saving up his shillings. "I don't believe any lad ever had so valuable a prize as I thought I had purchased in that desk, mother," was his laughing remark. "I dare say it has a great deal of old rubbish in it," said Lady Chavasse, slightingly. "Not much else--for all the good it can ever be. I was only glancing over the rubbish--foolish mementoes of foolish days. These days are weary; and I hardly know how to make their hours fly." Lady Chavasse sighed at the words. He used to go shooting in the autumn--fishing--hunting once in a way, in the later season: he had not strength for these sports now. Opening the desk he commonly used, a very handsome one that had been Lady Chavasse's present to him, he took a small book from it and put it into his breast-pocket. Lady Chavasse, watching all his movements, as she had grown accustomed to do, saw and knew what the book was--a Bible. Perhaps nothing had struck so much on my lady's fears as the habit he had fallen into of often reading the Bible. She had come upon him doing it in all kinds of odd places. Out amidst the rocks at the seaside where they had recently been staying--and should have stayed longer but that he grew tired and wanted to come home; out in the seats of this garden, amidst the roses, or where the roses had him with this small Bible. He always slipped it away when she or any one else approached: but the habit was casting on her spirit a very ominous shadow. It seemed to show her that he knew he must be drawing near to the world that the Bible tells of, and was making ready for his journey. How her heart ached, ached always, Lady Chavasse would not have liked to avow. "Where's Rachel?" he asked. "On her sofa, upstairs."