r and
ancestral Ransomes, neatly set against the walls, peered out of the
dark.

Alexina put a hand over Charlotte's on the door knob. Molly yawned.

"It seems chilly here in my room," said Charlotte; "the sun isn't
round this side yet. Put your hats on the bed and Mrs. Garnier shall
go lie on Willy's sofa."

They followed her across the hall. "He has his bed and things in
there," she explained, nodding towards an adjoining room, "and he
keeps his books and such in here."

On the floor, otherwise uncarpeted, lay a bearskin. There was a sofa
against the wall and a plain deal table in the centre of the room,
piled with papers, books and pipes, about a lamp. There were some
chairs; a gun-rack, antlers, an alligator skin and some coloured
prints of English hunting scenes on the walls, and an old-fashioned,
brass-mounted cellarette hung in an angle. The south window looked out
across the grove upon Nancy; between the two east windows stood an old
secretary book-case.

Charlotte suggesting that Mrs. Garnier put on a wrapper, the two went
back to her bed-room. Alexina stood hesitating. She felt a sense of
surreptitiousness and embarrassment, and then took a step to the
book-case--any one might do that much--and read the titles of the
books.

About orange culture and fertilizing these first seemed to be, and
those next were concerned with the breeding of stock. They meant
Woodford and the future, probably. She skipped to the other shelves.
Buckle's Introduction to the History of Civilization, Hallam's Middle
Ages, Wealth of Nations, Wilhelm Meister, Poems of Heinrich Heine,
several volumes of Spencer and Huxley, Slaves of Paris, Lecocq, the
Detective, File No. 118, The Lerouge Case, The Scotland Yard
Detective, Carlyle's French Revolution, Taxidermitology, Renan's Life
of Jesus, Pole on Whist, Hoyle, Tom Sawyer, Past and Present, Pickwick
Papers, Herodotus, an unbroken shelf of Walter Scott, A Pair of Blue
Eyes, Cousin Pons, Drainage, Pendennis, Small Fruit Culture.

Why, here was a world, within these glass doors, she did not know. Yet
she had read diligently among Uncle Austen's books. She looked back in
memory over his shelves; Macaulay, yes, Uncle Austen cared so
essentially for Macaulay, and for Bancroft and Prescott, and Whittier
and Lowell. There were the standards in fiction and poetry in
well-bound sets. Uncle Austen himself admired Alexander Pope, and
Franklin's Autobiography; he liked Charles Reade's novels