Curiosity took many persons into Double Dykes that day, and in the room that had never been furnished they saw a mournful stack of empty brandy bottles, piled there by the auctioneer who had found them in every corner, beneath the bed, in presses, in boxes, whither they had been thrust by Grizel's mamma, as if to conceal their number from herself.

The counting of these bottles was a labor, but it is not even by them that the roup is remembered.
Among them some sacrilegious hands found a bundle of papers with a sad blue ribbon round them.

They were the Painted Lady's love-letters, the letters she had written to the man.

Why or how they had come back to her no one knew.
Most of them were given to Grizel, but a dozen or more passed without her leave into the kists of various people, where often since then they have been consulted by swains in need of a pretty phrase; and Tommy's school-fellows, the very boys and girls who hooted the Painted Lady, were in time--so oddly do things turn out--to be among those whom her letters taught how to woo.

Where the kists did not let in the damp or careless fingers, the paper long remained clean, the ink but little faded.