It was on such a day that I used to lie with my head in my mother's lap while she read to me. I remembered this with a certain calmness, for there had settled upon me a firmly assured belief that I should never be happy again, and I accepted the feeling with a stoicism that now I wonder at. But my pen runs from the main task of putting facts on paper. To return:
I entered the house, and insensibly caught the doctor's great hand in mine.
There was a musty, locked-up odor greeting us that checked full breathing. The big room on the right smelt like a cellar, dank and unhealthy.
The doctor drew aside a chair, and, opening a window and the shutters, admitted some light. Dust was all about, everywhere; the heavy oak centre table was littered with dead, starved flies; the whole place was so chill and unhomelike that I shuddered. The doctor closed the window.
"By Jove, it grows cold!" he said.
The lawyer, who had deposited a pair of large empty saddle-bags on the floor, stamped his feet.
"Heigho!" he cried, "let's cheer things up a bit. Here's a fire all ready for the lighting; that's a godsend."
In the wide fireplace were some good-sized logs and a handful of fat-wood. Drawing a flint and steel, he struck a light, and soon a tiny blaze crept up the old chimney, and broadened with a burst of flame at last into a cheerful, roaring, warming glow. It cleared the room of its unhealthiness, and all three of us spread our hands out to it as if it had been winter.
"I think the look of things has made us exaggerate the weather," said the doctor, with an attempt at a laugh. "Come, let's set to work."
The lawyer drew from his pocket a small bunch of keys. "We will have to try for it—they're not numbered," he replied, thrusting one into the keyhole of the desk in the chimney-corner.