When it was quite sure that no one was looking or listening, the shy soul might steal out of the air and turn the pages with a sigh.
Just so some savage lover might bring gifts of fruit and coloured beads, and bright plumed birds, to the grave of his dead love, for the future anthropologist to draw his moral of the childishness of all human idealisms.
One day, as Theophil had stolen quietly into that room on some such votive errand, an impulse had come to him to open the drawer of the desk.

There might be some message for him there.

Any writing of the dead we have never read before is a message.
Among various odds and ends, he came first upon one of those little tradesmen's account-books interleaved with bad blotting-paper in which the housewife writes her orders week by week.
It was full of Jenny's writing, and though the entries were merely weekly repetitions of the same string of groceries:--"2 lbs.

of the best tea," "6 lbs.

loaf sugar," "6 nutmegs," and so on,--yet, "the hand being hers," they made a record that could only be read through blinding tears; and one page which bore a severe little note, to the effect that the tea had been far from good of late, read almost like a personal revelation.
Theophil kissed the page, and, replacing the book, took up another, and his heart leapt to find it was a little diary.
He hesitated for a moment.