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76 Alan's house? He pushed the drawers shut hastily and hurried across the hall to the room opposite. In this room—plainly Benjamin Corvet's bedroom—were no signs of intrusion. He went to the door of the room connecting with it, turned on the light, and looked in. It was a smaller room than the others and contained a roll-top desk and a cabinet. The cover of the desk was closed, and the drawers of the cabinet were shut and apparently undisturbed. Alan recognized that probably in this room he would find the most intimate and personal things relating to his father; but before examining it, he turned back to inspect the bedroom.

It was a carefully arranged and well-cared-for room, plainly in constant use. A reading stand, with a lamp, was beside the bed with a book marked about the middle. On the dresser were hair-brushes and a comb, and a box of razors, none of which were missing. When Benjamin Corvet had gone away, he had not taken anything with him, even toilet articles. With the other things on the dresser, was a silver frame for a photograph with a cover closed and fastened over the portrait; as Alan took it up and opened it, the stiffness of the hinges and the edges of the lid gummed to the frame by disuse, showed that it was long since it had been opened. The picture was of a woman of perhaps thirty—a beautiful woman, dark-haired, dark-eyed, with a refined, sensitive, spiritual-looking face. The dress she wore was the same, Alan suddenly recognized, which he had seen and touched among the things in the chest of drawers; it gave him a queer feeling now to have touched her things. He felt instinctively, as he held the picture and studied it, that it could have been no vulgar bickering between wife and husband, nor any caprice of a