Roger
Vanderbridge. So this explained, in a measure at least, the carelessness
and the disorder! The desk was not his, but hers, and after her death he
had used it only during those desperate months when he barely opened a
letter. What he had done in those long evenings when he sat alone here
it was beyond me to imagine. Was it any wonder that the brooding should
have permanently unbalanced his mind?
At the end of an hour I had sorted and filed the papers, with the
intention of asking Mrs. Vanderbridge if she wished me to destroy the
ones that seemed to be unimportant. The letters she had instructed me to
keep had not come to my hand, and I was about to give up the search for
them, when, in shaking the lock of one of the drawers, the door of a
secret compartment fell open and I discovered a dark object, which
crumbled and dropped apart when I touched it. Bending nearer, I saw that
the crumbled mass had once been a bunch of flowers, and that a streamer
of purple ribbon still held together the frail structure of wire and
stems. In this drawer some one had hidden a sacred treasure, and moved
by a sense of romance and adventure, I gathered the dust tenderly in
tissue paper, and prepared to take it downstairs to Mrs. Vanderbridge.
It was not until then that some letters tied loosely together with a
silver cord caught my eyes, and while I picked them up, I remember
thinking that they must be the ones for which I had been looking so
long.
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