d to me," she cried.

There was a rap upon the door. He put her from him, and went to open. It
was Humphries with a lighted taper. He took it, thanked the man with a
word, and shut the door in his face, ignoring the fact that the fellow
was attempting to tell him something.

He returned to the desk. "Let us make quite sure that this is all," he
said, and held the taper so that the light shone into the recess. It
seemed empty at first; then, as the light penetrated farther, he saw
something that showed white at the back of the cachette. He thrust in
his hand, and drew out a small package bound with a ribbon that once
might have been green but was faded now to yellow. He set it on the
desk, and returned to his search. There was nothing else. The recess
was empty. He closed the trap and replaced the drawer. Then he sat down
again, the taper at his elbow, Mistress Winthrop looking on, facing him
across the top of the secretaire, and he took up the package.

The ribbon came away easily, and some half-dozen sheets fell out and
scattered upon the desk. They gave out a curious perfume, half of
age, half of some essence with which years ago they had been imbued.
Something took Mr. Caryll in the throat, and he could never explain
whether it was that perfume or some premonitory emotion, some prophetic
apprehension of what he was about to see.

He opened the first of those folded sheets, and found it to be a letter
written in French and in an ink that had paled to yellow with the years
that were gone since it had been penned. The fine, pointed writing was
curiously familiar to Mr. Caryll. He looked at the signature at the
bottom of the page. It swam before his eyes--ANTOINETTE-"Celle qui
l'adore, Antoinette," he read, and the whole world seemed blotted out
for him; all consciousness, his whole being, his every sense, seemed
concentrated into his eyes as they gazed upon that relic of a deluded
woman's dream.

He did not read. It was not for him to commit the sacrilege of reading
what that girl who had been his mother had written thirty years ago to
the man she loved--the man who had proved false as hell.

He turned the other letters over; opened them one by one, to make sure
that they were of the same nature as the first, and what time he did so
he found himself speculating upon the strangeness of Ostermore's having
so treasured them. Perhaps he had thrust them into that secret recess,
and there forgotten them; 'twas an explan