It may make this story easier to read at this point if we tell our reader that this twenty-fifth chapter contains little of vital import--is, in fact, only a passing reference to one or two by-incidents that came about in the half-year that followed. He cannot complain that they are superfluous if we give him fair warning of their triviality, and enable him to skip them without remorse. But they register, to our thinking, what little progress events made in six very nice months--a period Time may be said to have skipped. And whoso will may follow his example, and lose but little in the doing of it. Very nice months they were--only one cloud worth mention in the blue; only one phrase in a minor key. The old familiar figure of "the Major"--intermittent, certainly, but none the less invariable; making the house his own, or letting it appropriate him, hard to say which--was no longer to be seen; but the old sword had been hung in a place of honour near a portrait of Paul Nightingale, Mrs. Fenwick's stepfather--its old owner's school-friend of seventy years ago. At her death it was to be offered to the school; no surviving relative was named in the will, if any existed. Everything was left unconditionally "to my dear daughter by adoption, Rosalind Nightingale." Some redistributions of furniture were involved in the importation of the movables from the two rooms in Ball Street. The black cabinet, or cellaret, with the eagle-talons, found a place in the dining-room in the basement into which Fenwick--only it seems so odd to go back to it now--was brought on the afternoon of his electrocution. Sally always thought of this cabinet as "Major Roper's cabinet," because she got the whiskey from it for him before he went off in the fog. If only she had made him drunk that evening! Who knows but it might have enabled him to fight against that terrible heart-failure that was not the result of atmospheric conditions. She never looked at this cabinet but the thought passed through her mind.