cracked mirror that hung at one
end. That old garret was a veritable fairyland to me.

There was one old chest which I could not explore and, like all
forbidden things, it possessed a great attraction for me. It stood
away back in a dusty, cobwebbed corner, a strong, high wooden box,
painted blue. From some words which I had heard Grandmother let fall I
was sure it had a history; it was the one thing she never explored in
her periodical overhaulings. When I grew tired of playing I liked to
creep up on it and sit there, picturing out my own fancies concerning
it--of which my favourite one was that some day I should solve the
riddle and open the chest to find it full of gold and jewels with
which I might restore the fortune of the Laurances and all the
traditionary splendours of the old Grange.

I was sitting there one day when Aunt Winnifred and Grandmother
Laurance came up the narrow dark staircase, the latter jingling her
keys and peering into the dusty corners as she came along the room.
When they came to the old chest, Grandmother rapped the top smartly
with her keys.

"I wonder what is in this old chest," she said. "I believe it really
should be opened. The moths may have got into it through that crack in
the lid."

"Why don't you open it, Mother?" said Mrs. DeLisle. "I am sure that
key of Robert's would fit the lock."

"No," said Grandmother in the tone that nobody, not even Aunt
Winnifred, ever dreamed of disputing. "I will not open that chest
without Eliza's permission. She confided it to my care when she went
away, and I promised that it should never be opened until she came for
it."

"Poor Eliza," said Mrs. DeLisle thoughtfully. "I wonder what she is
like now. Very much changed, like all the rest of us, I suppose. It is
almost thirty years since she was here. How pretty she was!"

"I never approved of her," said Grandmother brusquely. "She was a
sentimental, fanciful creature. She might have married well but she
preferred to waste her life pining over the memory of a man who was
not worthy to untie the shoelace of a Laurance."

Mrs. DeLisle sighed softly and made no reply. People said that she had
had her own romance in her youth and that her mother had sternly
repressed it. I had heard that her marriage with Mr. DeLisle was
loveless on her part and proved very unhappy. But he had been dead
many years, and Aunt Winnifred never spoke of him.

"I have made up my mind what to do," said Grandmother dec