ntly, pointing to the empty scuttle.
"I rang for coals."

Magdalen went back to the kitchen regions. After communicating the
admiral's order to the servant whose special duty it was to attend to
the fires, she returned to the pantry, and, gently closing the door, sat
down alone to think.

It had been her impression in the drawing-room--and it was her
impression still--that she had accidentally surprised Admiral Bartram on
a visit to the east rooms, which, for some urgent reason of his own, he
wished to keep a secret. Haunted day and night by the one dominant idea
that now possessed her, she leaped all logical difficulties at a bound,
and at once associated the suspicion of a secret proceeding on the
admiral's part with the kindred suspicion which pointed to him as the
depositary of the Secret Trust. Up to this time it had been her settled
belief that he kept all his important documents in one or other of the
suite of rooms which he happened to be occupying for the time being.
Why--she now asked herself, with a sudden distrust of the conclusion
which had hitherto satisfied her mind--why might he not lock some of
them up in the other rooms as well? The remembrance of the keys still
concealed in their hiding-place in her room sharpened her sense of the
reasonableness of this new view. With one unimportant exception, those
keys had all failed when she tried them in the rooms on the north side
of the house. Might they not succeed with the cabinets and cupboards in
the east rooms, on which she had never tried them, or thought of trying
them, yet? If there was a chance, however small, of turning them to
better account than she had turned them thus far, it was a chance to be
tried. If there was a possibility, however remote, that the Trust might
be hidden in any one of the locked repositories in the east wing, it was
a possibility to be put to the test. When? Her own experience answered
the question. At the time when no prying eyes were open, and no
accidents were to be feared--when the house was quiet--in the dead of
night.

She knew enough of her changed self to dread the enervating influence of
delay. She determined to run the risk headlong that night.

More blunders escaped her when dinner-time came; the admiral's
criticisms on her waiting at table were sharper than ever. His hardest
words inflicted no pain on her; she scarcely heard him--her mind was
dull to every sense but the sense of the coming trial. The evening wh