"Quite so," agreed
the voice of Conscience. "For instance, Mary would be delighted. Why not
begin with her? In fact, why not peruse these pages together--it would
lead to some interesting arguments? Why pore over them in this selfish
manner all alone and at the dead of night when no one can possibly
disturb you, or, since you have blocked the hagioscope, even see you?
And why does the door of that safe stand open? Because of the risk of
fire if anyone should chance to come in with a candle, I suppose. No,
of course it would not be right to leave such books about; especially as
they do not belong to you."

Then enraged, or at least seriously irritated, by these impertinent
comments of his inner self upon himself, Morris bade Conscience to be
gone to its own place. Next, after contemplating it for a while as Eve
might have contemplated the apple, unmindful of a certain petition in
the Lord's Prayer, he took up the volume marked I, and began to read
the well-remembered hand-writing with its quaint mediaeval-looking
contractions. Even at the age when its author had opened her diary,
he noted that this writing was so tiny and neat that many of the
pages might have been taken from a monkish missal. Also there were few
corrections; what she set down was already determined in her mind.

From that time forward Morris sat up even later than usual, nor did
he waste those precious solitary hours. But the diary covered ten full
years of a woman's life, during all of which time certainly never a week
passed without her making entries in it, some of them of considerable
length. Thus it came about--for he skipped no word--that a full month
had gone by before Morris closed the last volume and slipped it away
into its hiding-place in the safe.

As Mr. Fregelius had said, the history was a history of thoughts and
theories, rather than of facts, but notwithstanding this, perhaps on
account of it, indeed, it was certainly a work which would have struck
the severest and least interested critic as very remarkable. The
prevailing note was that of vividness. What the writer had felt, what
she had imagined, what she had desired, was all set out, frequently in
but few words, with such crystal clearness, such incisive point, that it
came home to the reader's thought as a flash of sudden light might come
home to his eye. In a pre-eminent degree Stella possessed the gift of
expression. Even her most abstruse self-communings and speculations were