I stole from the room. In the passage I found the old man-servant waiting for me; he shut the door softly, and I followed him back to my own room. There I took his arm and looked in his face.
"What is the meaning of this?"
"I dursn't tell you, sir; oh, sir, my heart be gone with the sorrow of it all, but if you wish, I will bring the book that he was always a-writing in for these months past."
"Yes, get the book, please, at once: no thank you, nothing to eat yet, I wish to see the book first."
He went, and returned with a large, old-fashioned common-place book, the leaves of which were covered with writing. It was a woman's hand.
I took it down stairs, and went with it into the garden.
There, on a seat in the middle of an old Dutch garden, very prim, very silent, where the sunlight fell upon the faces of the amber and purple pansies, and the great white carnations shook their ruffles to the wind with a dreamy and seventeenth century air, I sat and read this story, written by the hand of a dead cavalier who craves, through me, your sympathy for his deathless sorrow.
THE BOOK