Yet there were little services these hands might still do for her. There in her own little room her own books still stood in their places. These could be taken care of, her little desk could still be kept as she had left it, with her pen laid down as she had last laid it. There were note-paper and envelopes, and ink and blotting-paper, all ready, if some day, by a miracle--who could tell?--she might steal into that room and want to leave a message. There should be fresh flowers for her to find there too if she did come. And that new edition of Scott which was not finished issuing when she went away, she would find that complete when she came back. Her little collection of fairy books too--she was sure to glance at that! and then she would find two or three new ones there finer than any of the old ones; alas! so many beautiful books kept coming out now that she had gone. Yet somehow she might see them, after all, if they were taken softly to that little room and laid on that table altar. When it was quite sure that no one was looking or listening, the shy soul might steal out of the air and turn the pages with a sigh. Just so some savage lover might bring gifts of fruit and coloured beads, and bright plumed birds, to the grave of his dead love, for the future anthropologist to draw his moral of the childishness of all human idealisms. One day, as Theophil had stolen quietly into that room on some such votive errand, an impulse had come to him to open the drawer of the desk. There might be some message for him there. Any writing of the dead we have never read before is a message. Among various odds and ends, he came first upon one of those little tradesmen's account-books interleaved with bad blotting-paper in which the housewife writes her orders week by week. It was full of Jenny's writing, and though the entries were merely weekly repetitions of the same string of groceries:--"2 lbs. of the best tea," "6 lbs. loaf sugar," "6 nutmegs," and so on,--yet, "the hand being hers," they made a record that could only be read through blinding tears; and one page which bore a severe little note, to the effect that the tea had been far from good of late, read almost like a personal revelation. Theophil kissed the page, and, replacing the book, took up another, and his heart leapt to find it was a little diary. He hesitated for a moment. It seemed wrong to read it, and yet he knew that Jenny's soul held nothing she would not have shared with him, and he was so hungry for a word from her though it were only a word out of the past.