.

Of the four inhabitable rooms which were all at the admiral's disposal
during the day--that is to say, of the dining-room, the library, the
morning-room, and the drawing-room opening out of the vestibule--the
library appeared to be the apartment in which, if he had a preference,
he passed the greater part of his time. There was a table in this room,
with drawers that locked; there was a magnificent Italian cabinet, with
doors that locked; there were five cupboards under the book-cases, every
one of which locked. There were receptacles similarly secured in the
other rooms; and in all or any of these papers might be kept.

She had answered the bell, and had seen him locking and unlocking,
now in one room, now in another, but oftenest in the library. She had
noticed occasionally that his expression was fretful and impatient when
he looked round at her from an open cabinet or cupboard and gave his
orders; and she inferred that something in connection with his papers
and possessions--it might or might not be the Secret Trust--irritated
and annoyed him from time to time. She had heard him more than once lock
something up in one of the rooms, come out and go into another room,
wait there a few minutes, then return to the first room with his keys in
his hand, and sharply turn the locks and turn them again. This fidgety
anxiety about his keys and his cupboards might be the result of the
inbred restlessness of his disposition, aggravated in a naturally active
man by the aimless indolence of a life in retirement--a life drifting
backward and forward among trifles, with no regular employment to steady
it at any given hour of the day. On the other hand, it was just as
probable that these comings and goings, these lockings and unlockings,
might be attributable to the existence of some private responsibility
which had unexpectedly intruded itself into the old man's easy
existence, and which tormented him with a sense of oppression new to the
experience of his later years. Either one of these interpretations might
explain his conduct as reasonably and as probably as the other. Which
was the right interpretation of the two, it was, in Magdalen's position,
impossible to say.

The one certain discovery at which she arrived was made in her first
day's observation of him. The admiral was a rigidly careful man with his
keys.

All the smaller keys he kept on a ring in the breast-pocket of his coat.
The larger he locked up together; gen