I found, when I did mechanically as she had bade me do, that Margaret, with the instinct of an old servant, which is sometimes as keen as that of an animal, had already sensed the presence of some crisis and prowled about in her soft-footed way until she had discovered the truth. She was lying at the bottom of the stairs, her face buried in her hands and her broad back rising and falling with slow and silent tides of grief. Julianna and her father were together the old woman's life. One half had gone. "Come, Margaret," said I softly. "Very well, sir," she answered after a minute, and rising, straightened her cap, preparing for duty like a broken-hearted soldier. And so she went on in that next hour or two, telephoning, directing, arranging and doing with me all those necessary things. In spite of her labors she seemed always to be at my elbow, a ceaseless little whimpering in her throat. Her spectacles were befogged with the mist from her old blue eyes, which, like the color of old china, had faded with wetting and drying in years of family use, but she did not again give up to her grief. Therefore, when at last we looked at each other in the hall in one of those moments when, at the end of a task, a mental inventory is taken to be sure that all is done, I was surprised to see her expression change suddenly, to hear a cry of dismay escape her, and to observe her trundle herself toward the library door in grotesque haste. When, following her, I went into the room, I found her thick fingers pulling open drawer after drawer of the desk, and turning over the papers they contained. "It was here, Mr. Estabrook. Oh, my God! Mr. Estabrook, I saw him put it here!" she cried. "What?" I asked, with a glimmer of memory. "The papers. They was marked for her, but she mustn't ever have 'em! I'd rather they should pluck me from my bones, sir! And I saw him put 'em here!" "He took them out again," I cried, touched by her contagious fear. "He died with them on the floor beside him. I know what you mean. The blue seal." "Yes, the blue seal!" she cried in recognition, and stumbling across the room she fell upon her knees, reaching under the old easy-chair and the desk, patting over the rug with her hand, turning up its corners, searching with her face bent down, like a devotee of some strange sect, muttering to herself. "She must never see," she exclaimed monotonously. "Poor child, she must never see. It is worse than death--a hundred times. Oh, what has he done with that terrible package!" Suddenly, throwing herself upward and backward, until the upper half of her body was erect, and with a small object held up to my astonished eyes between her forefinger and thumb, she uttered a cry of despair and rage. She had found a piece of the sealing wax with which the packet, once offered to my eyes, had been fastened! "It's too late," she wailed miserably. "Do you see that? The girl has read it. She would not let me in her room. It's too late!"