e other of the few objects in the room, as if the
discovery of it had saddened rather than surprised him. Matting of
some foreign sort covered the floor. Two cane chairs and a plain table
comprised the whole of the furniture. The walls were plainly papered,
and bare--broken to the eye in one place by a door leading into the
interior of the house; in another, by a small stove; in a third, by the
book-shelves which Midwinter had already noticed. He returned to the
books, and this time he took some of them down from the shelves.

The first that he opened contained lines in a woman's handwriting,
traced in ink that had faded with time. He read the inscription--"Jane
Armadale, from her beloved father. Thorpe Ambrose, October, 1828."
In the second, third, and fourth volumes that he opened, the same
inscription re-appeared. His previous knowledge of dates and persons
helped him to draw the true inference from what he saw. The books must
have belonged to Allan's mother; and she must have inscribed them with
her name, in the interval of time between her return to Thorpe Ambrose
from Madeira and the birth of her son. Midwinter passed on to a volume
on another shelf--one of a series containing the writings of Mrs.
Hemans. In this case, the blank leaf at the beginning of the book was
filled on both sides with a copy of verses, the writing being still
in Mrs. Armadale's hand. The verses were headed "Farewell to Thorpe
Ambrose," and were dated "March, 1829"--two months only after Allan had
been born.

Entirely without merit in itself, the only interest of the little poem
was in the domestic story that it told.

The very room in which Midwinter then stood was described--with the
view on the garden, the window made to open on it, the bookshelves, the
Niobe, and other more perishable ornaments which Time had destroyed.
Here, at variance with her brothers, shrinking from her friends, the
widow of the murdered man had, on her own acknowledgment, secluded
herself, without other comfort than the love and forgiveness of her
father, until her child was born. The father's mercy and the father's
recent death filled many verses, happily too vague in their commonplace
expression of penitence and despair to give any hint of the marriage
story in Madeira to any reader who looked at them ignorant of the truth.
A passing reference to the writer's estrangement from her surviving
relatives, and to her approaching departure from Thorpe Ambrose,
follo