He passed her, and stopped in the middle of the room.  Magdalen ventured near enough to him to be within reach of his voice as he muttered to himself.  She ventured nearer still, and heard the name of her dead husband fall distinctly from the sleep-walker’s lips.

“Noel!” he said, in the low monotonous tones of a dreamer talking in his sleep, “my good fellow, Noel, take it back again!  It worries me day and night.  I don’t know where it’s safe; I don’t know where to put it.  Take it back, Noel—­take it back!”

As those words escaped him, he walked to the buhl cabinet.  He sat down in the chair placed before it, and searched in the basket among his keys.  Magdalen softly followed him, and stood behind his chair, waiting with the candle in her hand.  He found the key, and unlocked the cabinet.  Without an instant’s hesitation, he drew out a drawer, the second of a row.  The one thing in the drawer was a folded letter.  He removed it, and put it down before him on the table.  “Take it back, Noel!” he repeated, mechanically; “take it back!”

Magdalen looked over his shoulder and read these lines, traced in her husband’s handwriting, at the top of the letter:  To be kept in your own possession, and to be opened by yourself only on the day of my decease.  Noel Vanstone. She saw the words plainly, with the admiral’s name and the admiral’s address written under them.

The Trust within reach of her hand!  The Trust traced to its hiding-place at last!

She took one step forward, to steal round his chair and to snatch the letter from the table.  At the instant when she moved, he took it up once more, locked the cabinet, and, rising, turned and faced her.

In the impulse of the moment, she stretched out her hand toward the hand in which he held the letter.  The yellow candle-light fell full on him.  The awful death-in-life of his face—­the mystery of the sleeping body, moving in unconscious obedience to the dreaming mind—­daunted her.  Her hand trembled, and dropped again at her side.

He put the key of the cabinet back in the basket, and crossed the room to the bureau, with the basket in one hand and the letter in the other.  Magdalen set the candle on the table again, and watched him.  As he had opened the cabinet, so he now opened the bureau.  Once more Magdalen stretched out her hand, and once more she recoiled before the mystery and the terror of his sleep.  He put the letter in a drawer at the back of the bureau, and closed the heavy oaken lid again.  “Yes,” he said.  “Safer there, as you say, Noel—­safer there.”  So he spoke.  So, time after time, the words that betrayed him revealed the dead man living and speaking again in the dream.

Had he locked the bureau?  Magdalen had not heard the lock turn.  As he slowly moved away, walking back once more toward the middle of the room, she tried the lid.  It was locked.  That discovery made, she looked to see what he was doing next.  He was leaving the room again, with the basket of keys in his hand.  When her first glance overtook him, he was crossing the threshold of the door.