Marjory’s heart contracted with a pang of pain, as though some gigantic hand had crushed it. She thought it was grief, but it was something more than simple grief. Under the sway of this feeling she went to the table upon which his desk had been placed, and seated herself once more before it. The last time she had done so--that time when she had ineffectually questioned Fanshawe--she had felt herself shrink from the painful task, and had not really made any investigation into poor Tom’s secrets. Now she opened the desk with her eyes full of tears for him, with that painful contraction at her heart. There is nothing in the world so sad as thus to open some human creature’s most cherished repositories, when the poor soul is gone, and can guard his foolishness no more. How trivial half the things are! a fourth part of them, at least, thrown there in that light-hearted inadvertence which death makes to appear like a solemn intention, puzzling the survivors with its want of meaning. Why did he keep this or that? an unimportant invitation, a letter about nothing at all, an empty envelope, a memorandum about a race, a receipt for physic for a horse. What a curious mixture of awe and astonishment was in her as she gathered them together! They were good for nothing but the waste-basket; and yet the fact that Tom had treasured them gave the worthless scraps an interest. She cleared away a mass of these remains of his life. There is a little hill near Rome which is made, they say, of fragments of crockery, and such other valueless relics of an ended existence; but ah me! when one remembers what sacred spot lies there under the cypress, in the shadow of Testaccio, how solemn and sacred does that mound of classic rubbish become to us! Something of the same effect was wrought upon Marjory by the sight of poor Tom’s rubbish, now that death had made it mysterious. She tried hard to get some meaning out of it, and failing in that, put it aside in a pile, with a certainty that it must be her perceptions which were in fault. Was there nothing to be found but these miserable débris, that had so little signification? There were bills besides, and letters about bills; letters which Marjory knew would be very little welcome to her father. How was she to tell him of them? Tom, poor fellow, had become as a god, as an angel to his father, since his life ended; and to plunge him back again into the old atmosphere of debt and promises to pay--how miserable it would be! She made these too up into a parcel by themselves with a sense of humiliation. Was this all that was left of Tom? His bills; and those frivolous scraps that meant nothing--that had no human value, that threw no light upon his existence. Was it worth while for a man to have been born, to have lived and died, for nothing better than that? Marjory felt that even ill-doing would have been better than no doing at all; and grew scornful almost of her own fears.