He was full of sadness to-night as he turned the key in the lock, and lifted the heavy lid of the bureau at which he had so often seen his father seated, arranging letters and papers with neat, leisurely hands, and the pensive placidity which characterized all the details of his life. That bureau was the one repository for all papers of a private nature, the one spot peculiarly associated with him whom they had laid in the grave at evensong. No one else had ever written on that desk, or possessed the keys of those quaintly inlaid drawers. And now the secrets of the dead were at the mercy of the survivors, so far as he had left any trace of them among those neatly docketted papers, those packets of letters folded and tied with red tape, or packed in large envelopes, sealed, and labelled. Allan touched those packets with reverent hands, glanced at their endorsement, and replaced them in the drawers or pigeon-holes as he had found them. He was looking for the manuscript of which his father had told him; the story of "a love which never found its earthly close." Yes, it was here, under his hand; a thin octavo, bound in limp morocco, a manuscript of something less than a hundred pages, in the hand he knew so well, the small, neat hand that, to Allan's fancy, told of the leisurely life, the mind free from fever and fret, the heart that beat in slow time, and had long outlived the quick alternations of passionate feeling. Allan drew his chair nearer the lamp, and began to read. CHAPTER VII. "THE DEAD MAN TOUCH'D ME FROM THE PAST." "I wonder how many lives there are like mine in this prosperous England of ours, eminently respectable, comfortable, and altogether protected from the worst hazards of fate, happy even, according to the standard measure of happiness among the squirearchy of England--and yet cold and colourless. I wonder how many men there are in every generation who drift along the slow current of a sluggish river, and who call that monotonous progress living. Up the river with the rising tide; down the river with the ebbing tide; up and down, to and fro, between level banks that are always the same, with never a hill and never a crag to break the monotony of the outlook. "We have a river within a stone's throw of my gates which always seems to me the outward and visible sign of my inward and spiritual life, a river that flows past farms and villages, and for any variety of curve or accident of beauty might just as well be a canal--a useful river bearing the laden barges down to the sea, a river on which a pleasure-boat is as rare as a kingfisher on its banks. And so much might be said of my life; a useful life within the everyday limits of English morality; but a life that nobody will remember or regret, outside my own household, when I am gone.