And yet this stately apartment was seldom used in either season. Letty would sometimes take a Godly book from that part of the place marked in dull gold _Devotional_, but always carried it away to read in her own chamber; and Sir Richard now and then would refresh himself in the topographical department by taking down the _History of Wheatshire_, where all the Family Seats were duly pictured, and the linked sweetness of the genealogy of the owners long drawn out; but the Lisgards were not a reading race. Moreover, when they did read, it was chiefly out of modern books temporarily supplied by Mr Mudie, or works most glorious to behold as to their bindings, and without which no lady's drawing-room can be said to be complete, but which happily are rarely seen in libraries. My Lady herself had a goodly store of books in her own boudoir, including most of the French and English classics, all presented to her at divers times by her late husband, and all read, if not for her own pleasure, then for his; she therefore visited the Library more rarely than any one except Walter, who would as soon have thought of visiting the laundry. The last time she had gone thither was just after Miss Aynton's first arrival, when she had taken that young lady to see some curious missals there deposited, containing certain initial letters which Rose was desirous of copying. She enters it now alone upon her return from that interview with Arthur Haldane at the Watersmeet--on a very different errand. She is no longer the kind of somewhat stately hostess, doing her young guest a pleasure, and at the same time perhaps taking a pardonable pride in shewing her the gem of the Abbey--its Library--for the first time. All pride, all stateliness, seem to have departed from that anxious face; her figure, however, is erect as of old, and her step as firm, as she closes the door of the vast room behind her, and walks towards its southern end. She looks neither to left nor right, for she is in search of none of those volumes which line the Library on either side. The place for which she is bound is in a far corner next the window, but very indirectly lighted by it; a small “study,” where, if such a thing as dust were permitted to accumulate at the Abbey at all, it would certainly lie; and where it did lie; a spot unvisited for years, ever since it had been determined that Sir Richard's profession should be the Law, when certain books were taken from it, and carried up to town to stock his chambers; for over this little literary den was written Legal. Truly, as the phrase goes, “it was not a place for a lady,” that dusky little chamber, lined with its bulky, calf-bound volumes, mostly in series, and often as not connected with one another by that emblem of their contents, a spider's web. What could my Lady have come hither to cull from such unpromising books? Is it possible that, unmindful of the proverb, that he who is his own lawyer has got a fool for his client,