‘No, ma’am, I noticed as you was close and silent like, and I knew my place too well to say anything. Troubles take hold of people different. If there’s anything on my mind I must out with it, if it was but to Ginger, the tortoiseshell cat; but some folks can keep their worrits screwed up inside ’em. It hurts ’em to speak.’ ‘That was my case, Trimmer. It hurt me to speak my husband’s name, or to hear it spoken, while he was forced to be far away from me. But now it’s all different. You cannot talk of him too much to please me. I hope you will be as fond of him as you were of the dear old man who is gone.’... Mr. Treverton must have a sitting-room of his own, of course; a den where he might write his letters, and see his bailiff, where he could smoke and meditate at his leisure, study if he ever cared to study, read novels even, were he disposed to be lazy; and where his happy wife could only come on sufferance, deeming it a vast indulgence to be allowed to sit at his feet sometimes, or even to fill his pipe for him, or, in rough winter weather, to kneel down before the blazing fire and warm his slippers, when he had come in from a cold ride round his land, doing good wherever he went, like a benevolent fairy in the modern form of an enlightened landlord. After much debate and perplexity, Laura decided upon giving her husband, for his own particular sanctum, that very room in which they two had met for the first time, on the snowy winter night when John Treverton came to see his dying kinsman. It was a good old room, not large, but pleasant, oak-panelled, with a fireplace in the corner, which gave a quaintness to the room; an oak mantelpiece with half-a-dozen narrow shelves running in a pyramid above it, and on these shelves an arrangement of old blue Nankin cups and saucers, crowned at the apex with the most delightful thing in teapots. There was an old cabinet in the room, so full of secret drawers, and mysterious boxes and recesses at the back of the drawers, that it was in itself the study of a lifetime. ‘Never hide anything in it, my dear,’ Jasper Treverton had said to his adopted daughter, ‘for be sure if you do you won’t be able to find it.’ To this room Laura brought other treasures; the most comfortable easy chairs in the house, the best of the small Dutch pictures, the softest of the Turkey carpets, the richest tapestry curtains, two or three fine bronzes, a lovely little Chippendale book-case. This last she filled with all her own favourite books, robbing the book-room below ruthlessly, in the delight of enriching her husband’s study, as this room was henceforth to be called. ‘He shall know and feel that he is welcome,’ she said to herself, softly, as she lingered in the room, touching everything, re-arranging, polishing, whisking away invisible grains of dust with a dainty feather brush, caressing the things that were so soon to belong to the man she loved.