t
upon but those bundles and bundles of dust-browned papers on the shelves
before him. What were they all about? He understood that they were his
father's: now that he was dead, it would be no sacrilege to look at
them. Nobody cared about them. He would see at least what they were. It
would be something to do in this dreariness.

Bills and receipts, and everything ephemeral--to feel the interest of
which, a man must be a poet indeed--was all that met his view. Bundle
after bundle he tried, with no better success. But as he drew near the
middle of the second shelf, upon which they lay several rows deep, he
saw something dark behind, hurriedly displaced the packets between, and
drew forth a small workbox. His heart beat like that of the prince in
the fairy-tale, when he comes to the door of the Sleeping Beauty. This
at least must have been hers. It was a common little thing, probably
a childish possession, and kept to hold trifles worth more than they
looked to be. He opened it with bated breath. The first thing he saw was
a half-finished reel of cotton--a pirn, he called it. Beside it was a
gold thimble. He lifted the tray. A lovely face in miniature, with dark
hair and blue eyes, lay looking earnestly upward. At the lid of this
coffin those eyes had looked for so many years! The picture was set all
round with pearls in an oval ring. How Robert knew them to be pearls
he could not tell, for he did not know that he had ever seen any pearls
before, but he knew they were pearls, and that pearls had something
to do with the New Jerusalem. But the sadness of it all at length
overpowered him, and he burst out crying. For it was awfully sad that
his mother's portrait should be in his own mother's box.

He took a bit of red tape off a bundle of the papers, put it through
the eye of the setting, and hung the picture round his neck, inside his
clothes, for grannie must not see it. She would take that away as she
had taken his fiddle. He had a nameless something now for which he had
been longing for years.

Looking again in the box, he found a little bit of paper, discoloured
with antiquity, as it seemed to him, though it was not so old as
himself. Unfolding it he found written upon it a well-known hymn, and at
the bottom of the hymn, the words: 'O Lord! my heart is very sore.'--The
treasure upon Robert's bosom was no longer the symbol of a mother's
love, but of a woman's sadness, which he could not reach to comfort. In
that hour