Towards eleven o’clock that morning Laura took her usual ride, but she had not been away from the house quite an hour before she turned back.

All at once she had remembered something. She returned homeward, now urging Crusader to a flying gallop, now curbing him to his slowest ambling walk. That which had so abruptly presented itself to her mind was the fact that Corthell’s match box⁠—his name engraved across its front⁠—still lay in plain sight upon the table in her sitting-room⁠—the peculiar and particular place of her privacy.

It was so much her own, this room, that she had given orders that the servants were to ignore it in their day’s routine. She looked after its order herself. Yet, for all that, the maids or the housekeeper often passed through it, on their way to the suite beyond, and occasionally Page or Aunt Wess’ came there to read, in her absence. The family spoke of the place sometimes as the “upstairs sitting-room,” sometimes simply as “Laura’s room.”