carpet, and in a year they had it dyed with
spots over it and called it a tiger skin."

She watched me suspiciously while I straightened the nails she had bent,
and lifted the boards. In the matter of curiosity, Miss Letitia was
truly feminine; great handfuls of excelsior she dragged out herself, and
heaped on Heppie's blue apron, stretched out on the floor.

The article that had smashed under the vigor of Miss Letitia's seventy
years lay on the top. It had been a tea-pot, of some very beautiful
ware. I have called just now from my study, to ask what sort of ware it
was, and the lady who sets me right says it was Crown Derby. Then there
were rows of cups and saucers, and heterogeneous articles in the same
material that the women folk seemed to understand. At the last, when the
excitement seemed over, they found a toast rack in a lower corner of the
box and the "Ohs" and "Ahs" had to be done all over again.

Not until Miss Letitia had arranged it all on the dining-room table, and
Margery had taken off her wraps and admired from all four corners, did
Miss Letitia begin to ask where they had come from. And by that time
Heppie had the crate in the wood-box, and the excelsior was a black and
smoking mass at the kitchen end of the grounds.

There was not the slightest clue to the sender, but while Miss Letitia
rated Heppie loudly in the kitchen, and Bella swept up the hall, Margery
voiced the same idea that had occurred to me.

"If--if Aunt Jane were--all right," she said tremulously, "it would be
just the sort of thing she loves to do."

I had intended to go back to the city at once, but Miss Letitia's box
had put her in an almost cheerful humor, and she insisted that I go with
her to Miss Jane's room, and see how it was prepared for its owner's
return.

"I'm not pretending to know what took Jane Maitland away from this house
in the middle of the night," she said. "She was a good bit of a fool,
Jane was; she never grew up. But if I know Jane Maitland, she will come
back and be buried with her people, if it's only to put Mary's husband
out of the end of the lot.

"And another thing, Knox," she went on, and I saw her old hands were
shaking. "I told you the last time you were here that I hadn't been
robbed of any of the pearls, after all. Half of those pearls were Jane's
and--she had a perfect right to take forty-nine of them if she wanted.
She--she told me she was going to take some, and it--slipped my mind."

I beli