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.
Pages:
1028
1029
1030
1031
1032
1033
1034
1035
1036
1037
1038
1039
1040
1041
1042
1043
1044
1045
1046
1047
1048
1049
1050
1051
1052