“Are you quite sure that everything here is exactly as Uncle Dick left it?” In spite of himself he could not keep his hideous anxiety out of his voice.
But Mrs. Leavitt did not notice. She was looking furtively about the unkempt room with disapproving eyes. She answered mechanically, “Oh—yes—everything. The day Richard’s coffin was carried out of it, Helen locked it up herself, just as it was. It has never been opened since.”
“She didn’t disturb any of the papers on this table?”
“No.”
“And no one has been here since, you are sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” she replied acidly. “If I refused you, my own nephew, admission twenty times at least, I wouldn’t allow any one else in, would I? Helen said, before she went up to town to live because she couldn’t bear to stay here, poor child—it’s very lonely without her—well, she said that she did not want any one to come in here until she returned. Naturally I respected her wishes—orders, you might call them, since this is her house now—not that I grudge that. Well, now you come with this letter from her, saying that you are to do what you like in the library, and are to have her father’s keys—so of course I opened it for you—and glad enough to get it opened at last—and here are the keys; it’s only recently I’ve had them. Helen kept them herself for a long time.”
Stephen took them from her quickly—almost too quickly, had she been a woman observant of anything but dust and disorder. “I persuaded her to write it,” he said. “It is time her father’s papers were looked over, and it would be too heavy a task for her—too sad.”
“Stephen, is she still grieving over Hugh’s disappearance?”
Pryde shrugged his shoulders. “H’m, yes.”
“Poor child—poor child! It seems as if everything were taken from her at once. And to think that a nephew of mine—well, nearly a nephew—should desert from the army, and in war time, too—that there should be a warrant out for his arrest! Just do look at that dust!”