She had answered the bell, and had seen him locking and unlocking, now in one room, now in another, but oftenest in the library.  She had noticed occasionally that his expression was fretful and impatient when he looked round at her from an open cabinet or cupboard and gave his orders; and she inferred that something in connection with his papers and possessions—­it might or might not be the Secret Trust—­irritated and annoyed him from time to time.  She had heard him more than once lock something up in one of the rooms, come out and go into another room, wait there a few minutes, then return to the first room with his keys in his hand, and sharply turn the locks and turn them again.  This fidgety anxiety about his keys and his cupboards might be the result of the inbred restlessness of his disposition, aggravated in a naturally active man by the aimless indolence of a life in retirement—­a life drifting backward and forward among trifles, with no regular employment to steady it at any given hour of the day.  On the other hand, it was just as probable that these comings and goings, these lockings and unlockings, might be attributable to the existence of some private responsibility which had unexpectedly intruded itself into the old man’s easy existence, and which tormented him with a sense of oppression new to the experience of his later years.  Either one of these interpretations might explain his conduct as reasonably and as probably as the other.  Which was the right interpretation of the two, it was, in Magdalen’s position, impossible to say.

The one certain discovery at which she arrived was made in her first day’s observation of him.  The admiral was a rigidly careful man with his keys.

All the smaller keys he kept on a ring in the breast-pocket of his coat.  The larger he locked up together; generally, but not always, in one of the drawers of the library table.  Sometimes he left them secured in this way at night; sometimes he took them up to the bedroom with him in a little basket.  He had no regular times for leaving them or for taking them away with him; he had no discoverable reason for now securing them in the library-table drawer, and now again locking them up in some other place.  The inveterate willfulness and caprice of his proceedings in these particulars defied every effort to reduce them to a system, and baffled all attempts at calculating on them beforehand.

The hope of gaining positive information to act on, by laying artful snares for him which he might fall into in his talk, proved, from the outset, to be utterly futile.

In Magdalen’s situation all experiments of this sort would have been in the last degree difficult and dangerous with any man.  With the admiral they were simply impossible.  His tendency to veer about from one subject to another; his habit of keeping his tongue perpetually going, so long as there was anybody, no matter whom, within reach of the sound of his voice; his comical want of all dignity and