It fell like a shadow across his light pleasure-loving soul.

He had expected so much from this unlooked-for inheritance, and all he had found was a melancholy house with a past.
He went aimlessly through the hall into the library.

It was there that his uncle had lived; there that he had been found when death came to look for him; among the books which he had been unable to carry away with him at his departure; rare old tomes and first editions, long shelves of dead authors, who, it is to be hoped, continue to write in other worlds for those who read their lives away in this.

Old Mr.Dare's interests and affections had all been bound in morocco and vellum.

A volume lay open on the table, where the old man had put it down beside the leather arm-chair where he had sat, with his back to the light, summer and winter, winter and summer, for so many years.
No one had moved it since.