She put the key in the lock. It resisted her first efforts to open it. With a contemptuous burst of impatience and a sudden exertion of her rare strength, she tore open the two doors of the press. Behind the door on the left appeared a row of open shelves. The opposite compartment, behind the door on the right, was filled by drawers with brass handles. She shut the left door; angrily banging it to, as if the opening of it had disclosed something which she did not wish to be seen. By the merest chance, Amelius had looked that way first. In the one instant in which it was possible to see anything, he had noticed, carefully laid out on one of the shelves, a baby’s long linen frock and cap, turned yellow by the lapse of time. The half-told story of the past was more than half told now. The treasured relics of the infant threw their little glimmer of light on the motive which had chosen the subjects of the prints on the wall. A child deserted and lost! A child who, by bare possibility, might be living still! She turned towards Amelius suddenly, “There is nothing to interest you on _that_ side,” she said. “Look at the drawers here; open them for yourself.” She drew back as she spoke, and pointed to the uppermost of the row of drawers. A narrow slip of paper was pasted on it, bearing this inscription:--_“Dead Consolations.”_ Amelius opened the drawer; it was full of books. “Look at them,” she said. Amelius, obeying her, discovered dictionaries, grammars, exercises, poems, novels, and histories--all in the German language. “A foreign language tried as a relief,” said Mrs. Farnaby, speaking quietly behind him. “Month after month of hard study--all forgotten now. The old sorrow came back in spite of it. A dead consolation! Open the next drawer.” The next drawer revealed water-colours and drawing materials huddled together in a corner, and a heap of poor little conventional landscapes filling up the rest of the space. As works of art, they were wretched in the last degree; monuments of industry and application miserably and completely thrown away. “I had no talent for that pursuit, as you see,” said Mrs. Farnaby. “But I persevered with it, week after week, month after month. I thought to myself, ‘I hate it so, it costs me such dreadful trouble, it so worries and persecutes and humiliates me, that _this_ surely must keep my mind occupied and my thoughts away from myself!’ No; the old sorrow stared me in the face again on the paper that I was spoiling, through the colours that I couldn’t learn to use. Another dead consolation! Shut it up.”