The Camp Fire Girls
Solve a Mystery

or, THE CHRISTMAS ADVENTURE at CARVER HOUSE

By HILDEGARD G. FREY

AUTHOR OF
The Camp Fire Girls Series

A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York

THE
Camp Fire Girls Series

A Series of Stories for Camp Fire Girls Endorsed by the Officials of the Camp Fire Girls Organization

By HILDEGARD G. FREY

The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods or, The Winnebago’s Go Camping The Camp Fire Girls at School or, The Wohelo Weavers The Camp Fire Girls at Onoway House or, The Magic Garden The Camp Fire Girls Go Motoring or, Along the Road That Leads the Way The Camp Fire Girls’ Larks and Pranks or, The House of the Open Door The Camp Fire Girls on Ellen’s Isle or, the Trail of the Seven Cedars The Camp Fire Girls on the Open Road or, Glorify Work The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit or, Over The Top With the Winnebago’s The Camp Fire Girls Solve a Mystery or, The Christmas Adventures at Carver House The Camp Fire Girls at Camp Keewaydin or, Down Paddles

Copyright, 1919
By A. L. Burt Company

THE CAMP FIRE GIRLS SOLVE A MYSTERY

The old man swayed, clutched at the empty air, and fell heavily in the snow at her feet.
The Camp-Fire Girls Solve a Mystery. [Page 155.]

THE CAMP FIRE GIRLS
SOLVE A MYSTERY

CHAPTER I
THE EMPTY HOUSE

Katherine Adams stepped from the train at Oakwood, glanced expectantly up and down the station platform, hesitated a moment, and then, picking out a conspicuous spot under a glaring arc light, deposited her suitcase on the ground with a thump, mounted guard beside it and patiently waited for Nyoda to find her in the surging crowd.

It was two days before Christmas, and travel was heavy. It seemed as though the entire population of Oakland was either coming home, departing, or rushing madly up and down before the panting train in search of friends and relatives. Katherine was engulfed in a tidal wave of rapturous greetings that rolled over her from every side, as a coachful of soldiers, home for Christmas, were met and surrounded by the waiting lines of townspeople.

Katherine stood still, absorbed in watching the various reunions taking place around her, while the tidal wave gradually subsided, receding in the direction of Main Street. The principal stream had already flowed past her and the crowd was rapidly thinning out when Katherine woke to the realization that she was still unclaimed. There was no sign of Nyoda. The expectant smile faded from Katherine’s face and in its place there came a look of puzzled wonder. What had happened? Why wasn’t Nyoda there to meet her? Was there some mistake? Wasn’t this Oakwood? Had she gotten off at the wrong station, she thought in sudden panic. No, there was the sign beside the door of the green boarded station; its gilded letters gleamed down reassuringly at her. Katherine stood on one foot and pondered. Was this the day she was supposed to come? What day was it, anyway? The thick pad calendar beside the ticket seller’s window inside the station proclaimed it to be the twenty-third. All right so far; she hadn’t mixed up the date, then. She had written Nyoda that she would come on the twenty-third, on the five-forty-five train. The train had been on time. Where was Nyoda?

Katherine was assailed by a sudden doubt. Had she mailed that letter? Yes, she was certain of that. She had run out to the mail box at ten o’clock at night especially to mail it. What had gone wrong? Why wasn’t there someone to meet her?

She looked around at the walls as if expecting them to answer, and her roving eye caught sight of the lettering on a glass door opposite. The telephone! Goose! Why hadn’t she thought of that before? Of course there was some mistake responsible for Nyoda’s not meeting her, but in a moment that would be all straightened out.

She sprang across to the booth and picked up the directory hanging beside the telephone. Then a queer, bewildered look came into her eyes and she stood still with the book hanging uncertainly from her fingers. She had forgotten Nyoda’s name! She twisted her brows into a pucker and made a frantic effort to recall it. No use; it was a fruitless endeavor. Where that name used to be in her mind there was now a blank space, empty and echoless as the original void. It was too ridiculous! Katherine gave a little stamp of vexation. It was not the first time a name had popped out of her mind at a critical moment. And sometimes—O horror! it didn’t come back again for days. Was there ever anything so utterly absurd as the plight in which she now found herself? She knew Nyoda’s name as well as her own. M. M. It certainly began with an M.

After nearly an hour’s exasperated wracking of her brains she gave it up in disgust and stalked out of the station. Not for worlds would she have confided to anyone her plight.

“People will think you’re an escaped lunatic,” she told herself in terrified wrath. “They might put you in an asylum, and it would serve you right if they did. You aren’t fit to be out without a guardian. After this you’ll have to have your destination written out on a label tied to your ankle, like a trunk.”

She had one recollection to guide her. The house Nyoda lived in stood on top of a hill. The name of Carver House and the address on Oak Street had faded along with Nyoda’s name. “I’ll walk until I come to a house on the top of a hill,” she decided, “and find it that way. There can’t be many houses on hills in this town, it seems to be all in a valley. Come along, Katherine, what you haven’t got in your head you’ll have to have in your heels.”

No one, seeing the tall, clever looking girl stepping briskly out of the station and turning up Main Street with a businesslike tread, would have guessed that she was a stranger in a strange town and hadn’t any idea where she was going. There was such an air of confidence and capability about Katherine that people would have been more likely to ask her to help them out of their difficulties than to suspect that she needed help herself.

Certainly, Nyoda’s house wouldn’t be hard to find. Oakwood lay in a valley, curled up among its sheltering hills like a kitten in a heap of leaves. To be on a hill Nyoda must be on the outskirts of the town. She inquired of a passing youngster what part of Oakwood was on a hill and got the information that Main Street ran up hill at the end.

She set out blithely in the direction he pointed, enjoying the walk through the crisp, icy air. A light fall of snow, white as swan’s down, covered the ground and the roofs, and sparkled in the light of the street lamps in myriads of tiny twinkles. Not many people were abroad, for it was the supper hour in Oakland. A Christmas stillness hovered over the peaceful little town, as though it lay hushed and breathless in anticipation of the coming of the Holy Babe. Low in the eastern sky burned the brilliant evening star, bright as that other Star in the East which guided the shepherds on that far-off Christmas night. Katherine felt the spell of it and gradually her hasty steps became slower and at times she stood still and looked upon the quiet scene with a feeling of awe and reverence. “Why, it might be Bethlehem!” she said to herself. “It’s so still and white, and there’s the star in the east, too!” Almost unconsciously she began to repeat under her breath:

“O little town of Bethlehem,

How still we see thee lie,

Above thy deep and dreamless sleep

The silent stars go by.”

“Only it isn’t quite true about the deep and dreamless sleep,” she qualified, her literal-mindedness getting the upper hand of her poetic feeling, “because they’re all inside eating supper.” The thought of supper made Katherine suddenly realize that she was ravenously hungry. She had had nothing to eat since an early lunch on the train. “I hope I get there before supper’s over,” she thought, and quickened her pace again. Not that she wouldn’t get something anyhow, she reflected, but somehow the idea of coming in just as supper was ready, and sitting down to a table covered with steaming dishes seized her fancy and warmed her through with a pleasant glow of expectation.

“Nearly there!” she said to herself cheerfully. “Here’s where Main Street starts to go uphill.” The houses had gradually become farther and farther apart as she went on, until now she was walking along between wide, open spaces, gleaming white in the starlight, with only an occasional low cottage to break the landscape. The walk was steeply uphill now, and looking back Katherine saw Oakwood curled in its sheltering valley, and again she thought of a sleek, well fed kitten lying warm and comfortable and drowsy, at peace with all the world.

“There aren’t any poor people here, I guess,” she thought to herself. “All the houses look so prosperous. There probably aren’t any hungry children crying for bread. I’m the only hungry person in this whole town, I believe. My, but I am hungry! I could eat a whole house right now, and a barn for dessert! Thank goodness, there’s the top of the hill in sight, and that must be Nyoda’s house.” A great dark bulk towered before her at the top of the steep incline, its irregular outlines standing sharply defined against the luminous sky. Katherine charged up the remainder of the hill at top speed, slipping and falling in the icy path several times in her eagerness, but finally landing intact, though flushed and panting, upon its slippery summit, and stood still to behold this wonderful house that Nyoda lived in, whose charms had been the theme of many an enthusiastic letter from the Winnebagos during the previous summer. It loomed large and silent before her, its frost covered window panes shining whitely in the starlight with a faint, ghostly glimmer. No gleam of light came from any of the doors or windows. The house was still and dark as a tomb. Katherine stood wide-eyed with disappointment and perplexity. Nyoda was not at home.

She clutched at a straw. Nyoda had gone to meet her and missed her; that was it. But at the same time she felt a doubt rising in her mind which rapidly grew into a certainty. This was not Nyoda’s house before which she stood on this lonely hilltop. It was some other house and it was absolutely empty. Not only was it untenanted, but it had the look of a house that has stood so for years. Even the soft, sparkling mantle of snow that lay upon it could not hide the sagging porch, the broken steps, the broken-down fence, the general air of decay which surrounded the place.

Katherine emitted a cluck of chagrin. She was puffing like an engine from her dash up the hill, she was tired out, she was ravenously hungry, she was unutterably cross at herself. She scowled at the dark house with its spectral, frosty windows, and made another frantic effort to recall Nyoda’s name, only to be confronted with that baffling blank where the name once had been.

With a growing feeling of helplessness she stood on one foot in the snow in the pose which she always assumed when thinking deeply, and considered what she should do next. Should she keep on walking and climbing all the hills until she finally came to the right one; should she go all the way back to the station and sit there until the name came back to her, or should she walk boldly up to one of the hospitable looking doors she had passed, confide her plight and ask to be taken in for the night? Katherine was trying to decide between the first two, leaving the third as the extreme alternative in case she neither found the right hill nor succeeded in remembering Nyoda’s name before bedtime, when suddenly something occurred which sent a chill of ice into her blood and left her standing petrified in her one-legged pose, like a frozen stork. From the dark and empty house before her came the sound of a song, ringing clear and distinct through the frosty air. It was the voice of a woman, or a girl. Beginning softly, the tone swelled out in volume till it seemed to Katherine’s ears to fill the whole house and to come pouring out of all the doors and windows. Then it subsided until it came very faintly, like the merest ghost of a song. Katherine felt the hair rising on her head; she gave an odd little dry gasp. Wild terror assailed her and she would have fled, but fear chained her limbs and she could not move hand or foot. She stood riveted to the spot, staring fascinated at the dark, untenanted house, which stared back at her with frost veiled, inscrutable eyes; and all the while from somewhere in its mysterious depths came the voice, now louder, now fainter, but always distinctly heard.

A sudden thought struck Katherine. Was she already a victim of starvation, and was this the delirium which starving people went into? They generally heard beautiful voices singing. No, that wasn’t possible—she couldn’t be starving yet. She was tremendously hungry, but there was still a fairly safe margin between her and the last stages. Somehow the thought of hunger, and the idea of food, commonplace, familiar victuals which it connoted, dissipated the supernatural atmosphere of the place, and Katherine shook off her terror. The blood stopped pounding in her ears; her heart began to beat naturally again; her limbs lost their paralysis.

“Goose!” she said to herself scornfully. “Flying into a panic at the sound of a voice singing and thinking it’s ghosts! I’m ashamed of you, Katherine Adams! Where’s your ’spicuity? Vacant houses don’t sing by themselves. When empty houses start singing they aren’t empty. Besides, no ghost could sing like that. A voice like that means lungs, and ghosts don’t have lungs. Anybody that’s got breath to sing can probably talk and tell me where the next hill is. I’m going up and ask her.”

She passed through an opening in the tumble-down fence, in which there was no longer any gate, and went up the uneven, irregular brick walk and up the broken steps, treading carefully upon each one and half expecting them to go down under her weight. They creaked and trembled, but they held her and she went on over the sagging porch to the door, which lay in deep shadow at the one side. She felt about for a bell or knocker, and then she discovered that the door stood open. She could hear the voice plainly, singing somewhere in the house. Failing to find a doorbell she rapped loudly with her knuckles on the door casing. To her nervous ears the sound seemed to echo inside the house like thunder, but there was no pause in the singing, no sound of footsteps coming to the door.

She rapped again. Still no sign from within. A sportive north wind, racing up the hill, paused at the top to whirl about in a mad frolic, and Katherine shivered from head to foot. She felt chilled through, and fairly ached to get inside a house; anywhere to be in out of the cold. She rapped a third time. Still the voice sang on as before, paying no heed to the knock. Katherine grew desperate. Her teeth were chattering in her head and her feet were going numb.

“Of course she can’t hear me knock when she’s singing,” thought Katherine. “The sound of her own voice fills her ears. I’m going in and find her. I’ll apologize for walking in on her so unceremoniously, but it’s the only thing to do. I’ve got to get in out of the cold pretty soon.”

Acting upon her resolution she stepped through the open door into the hall inside and tried to fix the direction from which the voice was coming. She looked in vain for a glimmer of light under a door to guide her to the mysterious dweller in this strange establishment. The house was apparently as dark on the inside as it looked from without. Katherine opened her handbag and fumbled for her electric flash. In a moment a tiny circle of light was boring valiantly into the gloom. By its gleam Katherine saw that she stood in a long hall. Upon her left was a succession of doors, all closed; upon her right a staircase curved upward into the blackness above. Idly she turned her flashlight on the staircase and noticed that the post was of beautifully carved mahogany. The polish was gone, but it must have been handsome once, must have been—Katherine gave a great start and nearly dropped her flashlight. Her eyes, traveling up the mahogany stair rail, encountered those of a man who was leaning over the banister half way up. His face, in the light of her flash, was white as a sheet, and he seemed to be staring not so much at her as at the door behind her, through which she at that moment discovered the voice to be proceeding.

Katherine recovered from her surprise and remembered her manners. This man must live here. She must explain quickly, or he would take her for a burglar, coming in that way and looking around with a flashlight. Katherine suddenly felt apprehensive. Suppose he wouldn’t believe her story? It was one thing to go into a house in search of a voice that wouldn’t come to the door; it was another thing to find a man inside.

She cleared her throat and wet her lips. “Excuse me for coming in like this—” she began. She got no farther with her apologies. At the sound of her voice the man gave a startled jump, backed away from the banister, ran down the stairs two steps at a time and disappeared through the front door, leaving Katherine standing in the empty hall, open-mouthed with astonishment.

CHAPTER II
THE PRINCESS SYLVIA

Katherine did not know whether she was more astonished or relieved at the sudden flight of the man on the stairs. “I suppose I do look pretty wild,” she reflected, “but I didn’t suppose my appearance was enough to make a man run on sight. Well anyhow, he isn’t going to trouble me, and that’s some comfort. Now to find the singer.”

There was an open transom over the door before which Katherine stood and she perceived that the voice came through this. With hand raised to knock on the door panel she paused in admiration. The song that floated through the transom had such a gay swing, such an irresistible lilt, that it set her head awhirl and her blood racing madly through her veins in a wild May dance. It was as though Spring herself, intoxicated with May dew and brimming over with all the joy of all the world, were singing. Like golden drops from a sunlit fountain the gay, glad notes showered down on her:

“Hark, hark, the lark at heaven’s gate sings,

And Phoebus ’gins arise

His steeds to water at those springs

On chaliced flower that lies;

And winking Mary buds begin

To ope their golden eyes,

With everything that pretty been,

My lady sweet arise!”

The voice fell silent, and Katherine came back to herself and knocked on the door.

“Come in, my dear Duchess,” called a merry voice from behind the door. There was no mistaking the note of glad welcome.

Katherine turned the knob and opened the door. Only darkness greeted her eyes.

“Where are you?” she asked.

From somewhere in the room came a sudden exclamation of surprise.

“Who is it?” demanded the voice which had bidden her enter. “You are not my lady-in-waiting, the Duchess.”

“I’m afraid I’m not,” said Katherine, considerably puzzled at the salutation she had received. She stood still inside the door trying to locate her mysterious hostess in the darkness. Her flashlight lay in her hand, useless, its battery burned out.

“I’m looking for another house on another hill,” she began hurriedly, speaking into the darkness and feeling as though she had slipped into the Arabian Nights, “and I got the wrong hill and and now I’m so mixed up I don’t know where to go. I heard you singing and came in to ask if you could tell me where the other hill is. I knocked before I came in,” she added hastily, “but you didn’t come to the door, so I took the liberty of walking in. I beg your pardon for coming right in that way, but I was so cold——”

“You are welcome in our lodge,” interrupted the invisible voice with lofty graciousness. “Do you not know where you have come?” it continued, in a tone which indicated there was a delicious surprise in store. “This is the royal hunting lodge, and I am the Princess Sylvia!”

“Oh-h-h!” said Katherine, too much astonished to say another word. She did not know how to act when introduced to a princess.

“Is there anything I can do for your majesty?” she asked politely, remembering that the other had mentioned a lady-in-waiting that she seemed to be expecting.

“Light the lights!” commanded the voice imperiously.

Katherine took a step forward uncertainly. “Where—” she began.

“On the table beside you!” continued the voice.

Katherine put out her hand and came in contact with the edge of a table, and after groping for a moment found a box of matches. She struck one and by its flare saw an oil lamp standing on the table beside the matches. She lit it and looked around the room curiously. She could not see the owner of the voice at first. The room was large and shadowy and contained very little furniture. A bare pine table on which the lamp stood; a couple of kitchen chairs; a cot bed next to the wall; a small stove; a rocking chair and a sewing machine; these were the objects which the lamp illuminated. The other end of the room lay in deep shadow. It was from this shadow that the voice now issued again.

“Bring the lamp and come here,” it commanded.

Katherine picked up the lamp from the table and advanced toward the shadowy corner of the room. The darkness fled before her as she advanced and the corner sprang into light. She saw that the corner was a bay, with three long windows, in which stood a couch. On the couch was a mountain whose slopes consisted of vari-colored piecework, and from whose peak there issued, like an eruption of golden lava, a tangle of bright yellow curls which framed about a pair of big, shining eyes. The eyes were set in a face, of course—they had to be—but the face was so white and emaciated as to be entirely inconspicuous, so Katherine’s first impression consisted entirely of hair and eyes. The eyes were dark brown, a strange combination with the fair hair, and sparkled with a hundred little dancing lights, as the girl on the couch—for it was a girl apparently about fourteen years old—looked up at Katherine with a roguish smile.

“You must be Her Grace, the Marchioness St. Denis,” she said with an air of stately courtesy, “of whose presence in our realm we have been informed. I trust Your Grace is not over fatigued. You will pardon the informality of our life here,” she continued, her brown eyes traveling around the room and resting somewhat regretfully on the shabby furnishings. “We take up our residence in the Winter Palace for state occasions,” she went on, “but for our daily life we prefer the simplicity of our Hunting Lodge. We are less hampered by formal etiquette here.”

Katherine stared in perplexity. Winter Palace? Hunting Lodge? Her Grace the Marchioness? What was this strange child talking about? Her feeling of having wakened in the midst of a fairy tale deepened.

“You can see the Winter Palace from the window here, when there isn’t any frost on it,” proceeded the “princess,” setting up a volcanic disturbance inside the patchwork mountain by turning herself inside of it, and she pointed toward one of the bay windows with a thin white hand. “It’s on top of a high hill and at night it twinkles.”

It came over Katherine in a flash that possibly it was Nyoda’s house that this queer child meant by the “Winter Palace.” A big house set on a high hill——

A rippling laugh caused her to look down hastily, and there was the girl on the couch fairy convulsed with laughter.

“It’s been such fun!” she exclaimed, demolishing the mountain by throwing the quilt aside with a sudden movement of her arms and disclosing a slender little body wrapped in a grayish woolen dressing gown. “I never had anybody from outside to play it with before. I get tired playing it alone so much, and Aunt Aggie is mostly always too busy to play it with me. Besides,” she said with a regretful sigh, “she has no imagination, and she forgets most of the really important things. Oh, it was wonderful when you said, ‘Is there anything I can do for you, Your Majesty?’ It was just as real as real!” She laughed with delight at the remembrance.

Katherine, as much startled by the swift change in her little hostess as she had been at her strange manner of speech in the beginning, was still uncertain what to say. “Is it a game?” she asked finally.

The girl nodded and began to explain, talking as though to an old friend.

“You see,” she began, “not being able to walk, it’s so hard to find anything really thrilling to do.”

“You are lame?” asked Katherine with quick sympathy. It had just come over her that while the slender arms had been waving incessantly in animated gestures as the voice chattered gaily on, the limbs under the dressing gown had not moved.

The girl nodded in reply to Katherine’s question. “Crippled,” she explained. “I was following a horse down the middle of the street trying to figure out which leg came after which when I slipped and fell and hurt my spine, and I have never walked since.”

“Oh-h!” said Katherine with a shudder of distress.

“And so,” continued the girl, “to pass away the time while Aunt Aggie was working I began to pretend that I was a princess and lived in a palace with my indulgent father, the king, and had a grand court and a great train of attendants—all dukes and duchesses and counts and things, and a royal grand duchess for my lady-in-waiting. That one is Aunt Aggie, of course, and it’s great fun to pretend she’s the duchess.”

“‘My dear Duchess,’” she cried, giving an animated sample of her make believe, “‘what do you say to having our cousin, the Crown Prince, in to tea!’ Then Aunt Aggie always forgets and says, ‘Let’s see, which one is the Crown Prince, now?’ It’s very disconcerting, the way the Grand Duchess forgets her royal relations!” She giggled infectiously and Katherine smiled too.

“What is your real name, Princess Sylvia?” she asked.

“Sylvia Deane,” replied the girl. “Only the princess part is made up. My name is S-s-ylvia-a.”

Her teeth began to chatter on the last words and she drew the quilt up around her tightly. Katherine suddenly felt cold, too. Then she became conscious for the first time that there was no heat in the room. In the first contrast to the biting wind outside the place had seemed warm, and with her heavy fur-collared winter coat she had not felt chilly. She glanced at the stove. It was black and lifeless.

“The f-f-fire’s g-g-gone o-u-t,” chattered Sylvia, huddling under the quilt as a fierce blast rattled the panes in the bay windows. Katherine felt hot with indignation at the thought of the invalid left all alone in the cold room.

“Where is your—lady-in-waiting?” she asked, a trifle sharply.

“Aunt Aggie’s gone to the city,” replied Sylvia. “She went at six o’clock this morning and she was going to back at noon. She hasn’t come yet, and I’m so cold and——”

She checked herself suddenly and held her head up very stiffly.

Katherine turned abruptly and made for the stove. It was a small old-fashioned cook stove, the kind that Katherine had been familiar with in her childhood on the farm. Beside it in a box were several lumps of coal and some kindling. She stripped off her gloves and set to work building a fire. When the stove had begun to radiate heat she lifted Sylvia, quilt and all, into the rocking chair and drew it up in front of the fire.

“And now, if you’ll tell me where things are I’ll prepare your Majesty’s supper,” she said playfully.

“Thank you, but I’m not hungry,” replied Sylvia.

“I don’t see how you can help being,” said Katherine wonderingly. “Or have you had something to eat since your aunt went away?” she added.

“No,” replied Sylvia.

“Then you must be famished,” said Katherine decidedly, “and I’m going to get you something.”

She moved toward a cupboard on the wall over in a corner of the room where she conjectured the supplies must be kept. The cupboard had leaded glass doors, she noticed, and the framework was of mahogany to match the woodwork of the room. It had probably been designed as a curio cabinet by the builder of the house.

“Never mind, I don’t want anything to eat,” said Sylvia again, in a tone which was both commanding and pleading.

“You must,” said Katherine firmly, with her hand on the cut glass knob of the cupboard door. “You’re cold because you’re hungry.”

She opened the door and investigated the inside. There were some cheap china dishes and some pots and pans, but no sign of food. She glanced swiftly around the room, but nowhere else were there any supplies. Then Katherine understood. Her intuition was slow, but finally it came to her why Sylvia did not want to admit that she was hungry. There was nothing to eat in the house. There was a pinched, blue look about Sylvia’s face that Katherine had seen before, in the settlement where she had worked with Miss Fairlee. She recognized the hunger look.

Sylvia met her eye with an attempt at lofty unconcern. “Our royal larder,” she remarked, valiantly struggling to maintain her royal dignity, “is exhausted at present. I must speak to my steward about it.”

Then her air of lofty composure forsook her all at once, and with a little wailing cry of “Aunt Aggie!” she put her head down on the arm of the chair and wept, pulling the quilt over her face so that Katherine could not see her cry.

Katherine was beside her in an instant, seeking to comfort her, and struggling with an unwonted desire to cry herself. The thought of the brave little spirit, shut up alone here in the dark and cold, hungry and anxious, singing like a lark to keep down her loneliness and anxiety, and welcoming her chance guest with the gracious air of a princess, moved Katherine as nothing had ever done before.

“Tell me all about it,” she said, cuddling the golden head close.

Sylvia struggled manfully to regain her composure, and sat up and dashed the tears away with an impatient hand. “How dare you cry, and you a princess?” she said aloud to herself scornfully, with a flash of her brown eyes, and Katherine caught a glimpse of an indomitable spirit that no hardship could bow down.

“’Twas but a momentary weakness,” she said to Katherine, with a return of her royal manner. Katherine felt like saluting.

“We’ve been having a hard time since Uncle Joe died,” began Sylvia. “He was sick a long time and it took all the money he had saved. Then Aunt Aggie got sick after he died and isn’t strong enough yet to do hard work. She makes shirts. There’s a shop here that lets her take work home. You see, she can’t leave me.” Here Sylvia gave an impatient poke at her useless limbs. “We came here from Millvale, where we used to live, a month ago. We couldn’t find any place to live, so Aunt Aggie got permission from the town to come and live in here until we could find a place. Nobody seems to own this house, that is, nobody knows who owns it, it’s been empty so long. Aunt Aggie sold all her furniture to pay her debts except her sewing machine and the few things we have here. Aunt Aggie makes shirts, but her eyes gave out this week and she couldn’t do anything, so there wasn’t any pay. Aunt Aggie got credit for a while at the store, but yesterday they refused her, so we played that we would keep a fast to-day in honor of our pious grandfather, the king, who always used to fast for three days before Christmas. Aunt Aggie only had enough money to go to the city and get glasses from somebody there that would make them for nothing for her, so she could go on sewing. She went on the earliest train this morning and expected to get back by noon. I can’t think what’s keeping her so late.”

Katherine looked at her watch. It was half past seven. She wondered if the shops were still open so that she could go out and buy groceries. She began to draw on her gloves.

“Don’t go away,” pleaded Sylvia, catching hold of her hand in alarm. “Stay here till she comes. Oh, why doesn’t she come? I know something’s happened to her. She’s never left me alone so long before. Oh, what will I do if she doesn’t come back?”

Fear seized her with icy hands and her face worked pitifully. “Aunt Aggie! Aunt Aggie!” she cried aloud in terror.

Katherine soothed her as best she could, mentioning all the possible things that could have occurred to delay her in the rush of holiday travel. Sylvia looked reassured after a bit and Katherine was just on the point of running out to get some supper for her when there was a sound of feet on the creaking steps outside.

“Here she comes now,” said Sylvia with a great sigh of relief.

The footsteps crossed the porch and then stopped. Instead of the sound of the front door opening as they expected there came a heavy knock.

“How queer,” said Sylvia, “she never knocks. There’s no one to let her in.”

Katherine hastened out to the hall door. A man stood outside. “Does Mrs. Deane live in this house?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Katherine.

“I’m Mr. Grossman, the man she works for,” he said. Katherine admitted him. “The girl, is she here?” he asked. Katherine brought him into the room. Sylvia looked up inquiringly.

Without greeting or preamble he blurted out, “Your aunty, she’s been hurt. Somebody just telephoned me from such a hospital in the city. She was run over by a taxicab and her collarbone broke and her head hurt. She’s now by the hospital. She tells them to tell me and I should let you know.”

He stopped talking and whirled his hat around in his hand as though ill at ease.

Sylvia sank back in her chair, dead white, her eyes staring at him with a curiously intent gaze, as though trying to comprehend the size of the calamity which had befallen her.

Tingling with pity, Katherine looked into Sylvia’s anguished eyes, and in the stress of emotion she suddenly remembered Nyoda’s name. Sheridan. Sheridan. Mrs. Andrew Sheridan. Carver House. 241 Oak Street. How could she ever have forgotten it?

“What’s going to become of me?” cried Sylvia in a terrified voice.

Mr. Grossman shifted his weight from one foot to the other and scratched his head reflectively. Then he shrugged his shoulders helplessly. He was a Russian Jew, living with his numerous family in a few small rooms over his shop, and what to do with this lame girl who knew not a soul in town was too much of a problem for him. To his evident relief Katherine came to the rescue. “I will take care of her,” she said briefly. She opened her handbag and fished for pencil and paper. “Go out and telephone this person,” she directed, after scribbling for a minute, “and give her the message written down there.”

Mr. Grossman departed, much relieved at being freed from all responsibility regarding Sylvia, and Katherine sat down beside her little princess and endeavored to soothe her distress of mind regarding her aunt. Finally the warmth of the stove made her drowsy and she fell into a doze with her head on Katherine’s shoulder.

Half an hour later the long blast of an automobile horn woke the echoes in front of the house. Sylvia half-awakened and murmured sleepily, “Here come the king’s huntsmen.”

Katherine slipped out through the front door and flung herself upon a fur-coated figure that was coming up the walk, followed by a man.

“Nyoda!”

“Katherine! What in the world are you doing here?”

Katherine explained briefly how she came there.

“But I never received your letter!” cried Nyoda in astonishment. “I thought you were coming to-morrow with the other girls. Poor Katherine, to come all alone and then not find anybody to meet you! I’m so sorry! But it wouldn’t be you, Katherine,” she finished with a laugh, “if everything went smoothly. Now tell me the important thing your message said you wanted to tell me.”

Katherine spoke earnestly for a few minutes, at the end of which Nyoda nodded emphatically. “Certainly!” she said heartily.

A minute later Katherine gently roused the sleeping princess. “What is it, my dear Duchess?” asked Sylvia drowsily.

“Come, Your Majesty,” said Katherine, beginning to wrap the quilt around her, “make ready for your journey. We leave at once for the Winter Palace!”

CHAPTER III
THE SHUTTERED WINDOW

“Nyoda, isn’t there a secret passage in this house somewhere?” asked Sahwah eagerly, pausing with the nutcracker held open in her hand. “There generally was one in these old houses, you know.”

Christmas dinner was just drawing to a close in the big, holly hung dining room at Carver House, and the merry group of young folks who composed Nyoda’s Christmas house party, too languid after their strenuous attack upon the turkey and plum pudding to rise from their chairs, lingered around the table to hear Nyoda tell stories of Carver House, while the ruddy glow from the big log in the fireplace, dispelled the gloom of the failing winter afternoon.

It was a jolly party that gathered around the historical old mahogany dining table, which had witnessed so many other festivities in the one hundred and fifty years of its existence. At the head sat Sherry, Nyoda’s soldier husband, still pale and thin from his long illness; and with a long jagged scar showing through the closely cropped hair on one side of his head. He had never returned to duty after the wreck in which he had so nearly lost his life. While he was still in the military hospital to which he had been removed from the little emergency hospital at St. Margaret’s where the sharp battle for life had been fought and won, there came that day when the last shot was fired, and when he was ready to leave the hospital he came home to Carver House to stay.

Opposite him, at the foot of the table, sat Nyoda, girlish and enthusiastic as ever, with only an occasional sober light in her twinkling eyes to tell of the trying year she had passed through. Along both sides of the table between them were ranged five of the Winnebagos—Katherine, Sahwah, Migwan, Hinpoha and Gladys, and in among them, “like weeds among the posies,” as the captain laughingly put it, were Slim and the captain, Slim filled to the bursting point as usual, and looking more than ever like an overgrown cherub. Across from these two sat a third youth, so slender and fine featured as to seem almost frail in comparison with Slim’s overflowing stoutness. This was Justice Dalrymple, Katherine’s “Perfesser,” now engaged in his experimental work at Washington, whence Nyoda had invited him up for her Christmas house party as a surprise for Katherine.

Agony and Oh-Pshaw, whom Nyoda had also invited to come over to the house party, were spending the holidays with an aunt in New York and could not come, much to Sahwah’s disappointment, who had not seen them since the summer before. Veronica was ill at her uncle’s home and also could not be with them.

Enthroned beside Katherine in a great carved armchair that had come over from England with the first Carvers, sat Sylvia Deane, looking very much like a story book princess. With their customary open-heartedness, the Winnebagos had already made her feel as though she were an old friend of theirs. The romantic way in which Katherine had found her appealed to their imaginations and added to their interest in her. Beside that, there was a fascinating something about her dark eyes and light hair that kept drawing their eyes to her face as though it were a magnet. There was so much animation in her voice when she talked that the most commonplace thing she said seemed extremely diverting. Her eyes had a way of suddenly lighting up as though a lamp had been kindled inside of her, and when she talked about other people her voice would take on a perfect mimicry of their intonations and expressions.

She showed not the slightest embarrassment at being thus transplanted into a strange household, so much more splendid than anything she was accustomed to. She was entirely at her ease in the great house, and acted as though she had been used to luxurious surroundings all her life. Katherine was secretly surprised to find her so completely unabashed. She herself was still prone to make ridiculous blunders in the presence of strangers, and was still ill at ease when anyone looked critically at her.

They were all surprised to learn that Sylvia was eighteen years old, instead of fourteen as they had all thought when they first saw her. Her slender, childlike form, and her short, curly hair made her look much younger than she really was.

The animated talk that had accompanied the first part of the dinner gradually died away, as a sense of repleteness and languor succeeded to eager appetites, and conversation had begun to lag, when Sahwah stirred it into life again by asking if there was not a secret passage in Carver House. A ripple of interest went around the table, and all the girls and boys began to sit up and take notice.

“Haven’t you had enough adventures yet to satisfy you?” asked Sherry quizzically. “Aren’t you content with fishing a lieutenant out of the Devil’s Punch Bowl the last time you were here, that you must begin again looking for excitement? By the way, where is this young Allison?”

“Still across,” replied Sahwah. “His last letter said he would be there for six months yet. He’s going on into Germany. He isn’t a lieutenant any more. He’s a captain.”

“Captain Allison?” asked Justice. “Captain Robert Allison? You don’t mean to say that you know Bob Allison?”

“Does she know Captain Allison!” echoed Hinpoha. “Who sent her that spiked helmet, and that piece of marble from Rheims Cathedral and that French flag with the bullet holes in it, to say nothing of that package of French chocolates? But, of course, you didn’t know,” she added, remembering that Justice had only met Sahwah the day before.

“Do you know Captain Allison?” asked Sahwah.

“Best friend I had in college,” replied Justice. “He was dreaming of flying machines then. Bob Allison, the fellow you pulled out of the water! It seems that all my friends, as well as my family, are going to get mixed up with you girls. It seems like fate.”

“Wherever the Winnebagos come there’s sure to be something doing,” said the captain. “I wonder what the next thing will be. What’s this about secret passages now?”

“With so much paneling,” continued Sahwah, “it seems as if there must be a hollow panel somewhere that would slide back and reveal a passage behind it. Isn’t there one, Nyoda?”

“There may be one, for all I know,” replied Nyoda, “but I have never found it if there is. I have never looked for any such thing. It takes all my time,” she proclaimed with a comic-tragic air, “to keep all the open passages in this place clean, without looking for any more behind panels.”

“Do you care if we try to find one?” asked Sahwah eagerly. “I just feel it in my bones that there is one somewhere.”

“Search all you like,” replied Nyoda, with an amused laugh.

“O goody!” exclaimed Sahwah. “Let’s begin right away.”

She rose from the table and the rest followed, much taken up with this new quest, and the search began immediately. Upstairs and downstairs they tapped, peered, pried and investigated, but without success. One by one they abandoned the quest and drifted into the library where Nyoda and Sherry and Sylvia sat in a close group before the fire; Sherry smoking, Nyoda reading aloud, and Sylvia watching the images in the fire. Sahwah and the captain were the last to give up, but finally they, too, drifted in and joined the ranks of the unsuccessful hunters.

Nyoda paused in her reading and looked up with a smile as Sahwah and the captain came in.

“What have you to report, my darling scouts?” she asked gravely.

“Nothing,” replied the captain, rather sheepishly.

Sahwah rubbed her fingers tenderly. “There are miles of oak paneling in this house,” she remarked wearily, “and I’ve rapped on every inch of it with my knuckles, until they’re just pulp, but not one of those panels sounded hollow.”

“Poor child!” said Nyoda sympathetically.

“You should have done the way the captain did,” said Slim. “He used his head to knock with instead of his knuckles; it’s harder.”

A scuffle seemed imminent, and was only averted by Sahwah’s next remark. “Nyoda,” she asked, “where does that door at the head of the stairs lead to, the one that is locked? It was locked last summer when we were here, too.”

“That,” replied Nyoda, “is the room Uncle Jasper used as his study. I’ve been using it as a sort of store room for furniture. There were a number of pieces in the house that didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the furniture and I set them in there until I could make up my mind what to do with them. I didn’t want to dispose of them without consulting Sherry, and as he has been away from home ever since we have lived here until just now, we have never had time to go over the stuff together. As the room looks cluttered with those odd pieces in there I have kept it locked.”

“Your uncle’s study!” exclaimed Sahwah. “Oh, I wonder if there wouldn’t be a concealed door in there! It seems such a likely place. Would you care very much if we went and looked there?”

Nyoda laughed at Sahwah’s eagerness in her quest. “You’re a true Winnebago,” she said fondly. “Never leave a stone unturned when you’re looking for anything. I might as well say yes now as later, because I know you will never rest until you have investigated that room. You’re worse than Bluebeard’s wife. I have no objections to your going in if you’ll excuse the disorderly look of the place and the dust that has undoubtedly collected by this time. I’ll get you the key.”

With the prospect of a fresh field for investigation the others revived their interest in the search and followed Nyoda eagerly as she led the way upstairs and unlocked the closed door at the head. A faint, musty odor greeted their nostrils, the close atmosphere of a room which has been shut up, although the moonlight flooding the place through the long windows gave it an almost airy appearance. Nyoda found the electric light button and presently the room was brilliantly lighted from the chandelier. The Winnebagos trooped in and looked curiously about them at the queer old desks and tables and cabinets that stood about. Sahwah’s attention was immediately drawn to the window at the far end of the room. She knew it was a window because it was framed in a mahogany casement like the other windows in the house, but instead of a pane of glass there was a dark, opaque space inside the casement. Sahwah ran over to it at once, and a little exclamation of astonishment escaped her as she examined it. On the inside of the glass—if there was a pane of glass there—was a heavy black iron shutter fastened to the casement with great screws.

“What did you put up this shutter for, Nyoda?” asked Sahwah wonderingly.

The others all came crowding over then to exclaim over the iron shutter.

“I didn’t put it up,” replied Nyoda. “It was there when I came here.”

“But what’s it for?” persisted Sahwah. “Is the window behind it broken?”

“No, it doesn’t seem to be,” replied Nyoda. “I looked at it from the outside.”

“Then what can it be for?” repeated Sahwah.

“I don’t know, I can’t imagine,” replied Nyoda. A note of wonder was creeping into her voice. “To tell the truth,” she said, “I never thought anything about it. I noticed that there was an iron shutter over that window when we first came here, but I was too much taken up with Sherry’s going away then even to wonder about it. The room has been closed up ever since and I had forgotten all about it. It does seem a queer thing, now that you call my attention to it. But Uncle Jasper did so many eccentric things, I’m not surprised at anything he might have done. We’ll take the shutter off in the morning and see if we can discover any reason for having it there.

“Now, aren’t you going to hunt for the secret passage after I’ve opened the door for you?” she said quizzically. “There’s still an hour or so before bedtime; long enough for all of you to complete the destruction of your knuckles.”

Again the house resounded with the tapping of knuckles against hardwood paneling, until it sounded as though an army of giant woodpeckers were at work, but the eager searchers continued to bruise their long suffering knuckles in vain. The paneling in Uncle Jasper’s study was as solid as the Great Wall of China.

CHAPTER IV
AN INTERVIEW WITH HERCULES

Among the furniture stored in the study was one piece which Nyoda had pounced upon with an exclamation of joy the night before when she opened the room to please the Winnebagos. That was an invalid’s wheel chair.

“Just the thing for Sylvia!” she exclaimed delightedly. “She can get around the house by herself in this. It’s a good thing you got curious about this room, Sahwah dear; I’m afraid I wouldn’t have thought of opening it until spring. I remember now, Uncle Jasper had a paralytic stroke some months before he died which left him lame, and he went about in a wheel chair during his last days. This certainly comes in handy now.”

The morning after Sahwah had discovered the iron shutter Sylvia was set in the wheel chair and rolled into the study, and the rest came flocking up to watch Sherry and the boys remove the shutter. It was no easy job, taking that shutter off, for the screws had rusted in so that it was almost impossible to turn them. Nyoda gave an exclamation of dismay at the holes left in the mahogany casement. The Winnebagos were too much absorbed in the window which was revealed by the removal of the shutter to pay any attention to the damaged casement. Unlike the other windows in the room, which were of clear glass, this one was composed of tiny leaded panes in colors. It was so dirty on the outside that it was impossible to see what it really was like. Sahwah hastened out and got cleaning rags and washed it inside and out, standing on the roof of the side porch to get at it on the outside, because it did not open. When it was clean, and the bright sun shone through it, the beauty of the window struck them dumb.

The leaded panes were wrought into a design of climbing roses, growing over a little arched gateway, the rich red and green tints of the flowers and leaves glowing splendid in the mellow light that streamed through it.

After a moment of breathless silence the Winnebagos found their voices and broke into admiring cries. Hinpoha promptly went into raptures.

“Why, you can almost smell those roses, they’re so natural! Oh, the darling archway! Did you ever see anything so beautiful? Don’t you just long to go through it? O why did your uncle ever have that horrible old shutter put over it?”

“Maybe he was afraid it would get broken,” suggested Gladys.

“But why would he put the shutter on the inside?” asked Sahwah shrewdly. “There would be more danger of the window’s getting broken from the outside than from the inside, I should think.”

“There wouldn’t be with Slim around,” said the captain, and prudently barricaded himself behind a bookcase in the corner. Slim gave him a withering glance, but did not deign to follow him and open an attack. He could not have squeezed in behind the bookcase, so he ignored the thrust.

“I wonder why he didn’t put shutters on the other windows also,” said Katherine.

“Mercy, I’m glad he didn’t!” said Nyoda with a shiver, eyeing the ugly screw holes in the smooth mahogany casement with housewifely horror at such marring of beauty. “One set of holes like that is enough. Isn’t it just like a man, though, to put screws into that woodwork! It’s time a woman owned this house. A few more generations of eccentric bachelors and the place would be ruined.”

“But,” said Sahwah musingly, “didn’t you tell us once that this house was the pride of your uncle’s heart, and he never would let any children in for fear they would scratch the floors and furniture?”

“That’s so, too,” replied Nyoda. “Uncle Jasper was so fond of this house that it was a byword among the relations. He loved it as though it were his own child. How he ever allowed anyone to put screws into that mahogany casement is a mystery.”

“Don’t you think,” said Sahwah shrewdly, “that there must have been some great and important reason for putting up that shutter? A reason that made him forget all about the holes he was making in the woodwork?”

A little thrill went through the group; all at once they seemed to feel that they were standing in the shadow of some mystery.

“What kind of a man was your uncle Jasper?” asked Sahwah.

“He was a queer, silent man,” replied Nyoda, sitting down on the edge of a table and rubbing her forehead to aid her recollection. “He was an author—wrote historical works. I confess I don’t know a great deal about him. I only saw him twice; once when I was a very little girl and once a few years ago. He never corresponded with any of his relations and never visited them nor had them come to visit him. Most everybody was afraid of him; he was so grim and stern looking. He couldn’t have been very sociable here either, for none of the people of Oakwood seemed to have been in the habit of calling on him. None of those that called on me had ever been inside the house before. The old man didn’t mix with the neighbors, they said. He seldom went outside the house. No one seems to know much about him. Of course,” she added, “living up here on the hill he was sort of by himself; there are no near neighbors.”

“Maybe he put up that shutter for protection,” suggested Hinpoha.

“With all the other windows in the house unshuttered?” asked the captain derisively. “A lot of protection that would be! Besides, do you think the neighbors were in the habit of shooting pop guns at him?”

“Well, can you think of any other reason?” retorted Hinpoha.

“Why don’t you ask old Hercules?” suggested Sahwah. “He might know.”

“To be sure!” cried Nyoda, springing down from the table. “Why didn’t I think of Hercules before? Of course he’d know. He was with Uncle Jasper all his life. I’ll call him in and ask him and we’ll have the mystery cleared up in a jiffy. Will one of you boys go out and bring him in?”

The captain and Justice sprang up simultaneously in answer to her request and raced for the stable. In a few minutes they were back, bringing old Hercules with them. Hercules had a somewhat forlorn air about him like that of a dog without a master. Nyoda said he was grieving for Uncle Jasper; Sherry said it was the goat he was mourning for. At any rate, he was a pathetic figure as he hobbled painfully up the stairs one step at a time on his shaky, stiff old limbs. His eyes brightened a bit as he saw the door into Uncle Jasper’s study standing open, and he looked around the room with an affectionate gaze as the boys piloted him in. Nyoda saw his eyes rest on the window from which the shutter had been removed, and it seemed to her that he gave a start and gazed through the window apprehensively.

“Hercules,” said Nyoda briskly, “we’ve just taken this ugly old shutter off that stained glass window, and we’re curious to know why it was put up. It seems such a pity to have put those great screws into that mahogany casement. Why did Uncle Jasper put it up?”

Hercules scratched his head and shifted his corn cob pipe to the other side of his mouth. “Dat shutter’s bin up a good many years, Mis’ ’Lizbeth,” he quavered.

“I see it has, from the way the screws were rusted in,” replied Nyoda. “But why was it put up?”

“Dat shutter’s bin dere twenty-five years,” reiterated the old man solemnly, still looking at it in a half-fascinated, half-apprehensive way.

“Yes, yes,” said Nyoda, trying to control her impatience. “But why has it been there all this time? Why did Uncle Jasper put it up?”

Hercules scratched his head again, and replaced his pipe in its original position. “I disremember, Mis’ ’Lizbeth,” he said deprecatingly. “It’s bin so long since. My memry’s bin powerful bad lately, Mis’ ’Lizbeth. Seems like I caint remember hardly anything. It’s de mizry, Mis’ ’Lizbeth; it’s settled in my memry.” He carefully avoided her eyes.

“Please try to remember!” said Nyoda, trying hard to hold on to her patience, but morally certain that Hercules was trying to sidestep her questions. “Think, now. Twenty-five years ago Uncle Jasper put up an iron shutter to cover the most beautiful window in Carver House. Why did he do it?”

Nyoda turned so that she looked right into his face, and her compelling black eyes held his shifty gaze steady. There was something strangely magnetic about Nyoda’s eyes. People could avoid answering her questions as long as they did not look into her eyes, but once let her catch your gaze, and things she wanted to know had a habit of coming out of their own accord. Hercules seemed to be on the point of speaking; he cleared his throat nervously and shifted the pipe once more. Nyoda cast a triumphant glance at Sherry. In that instant Hercules shifted his gaze from her face and met another pair of eyes, eyes that seemed to look at him accusingly, and sent a chill running down his spine. These were none other than the eyes of Uncle Jasper, who, hanging in his frame on the study wall, seemed to be looking straight at him, in the way that eyes in pictures have. When Nyoda glanced back at Hercules he was staring uneasily at Uncle Jasper’s picture and there was a guilty look about him as if he had been caught in a misdemeanor.

“I ’clare, I cain’t remember nothin’ ’bout why dat shutter was put up, Mis’ ’Lizbeth,” he said earnestly. “Come to think on it now, Marse Jasper ain’t never told me why he want it put up,” he continued triumphantly. “He just say, ‘Herc’les, put up dat shutter,’ and he ain’t ever say why. I axed him, ‘Marse Jasper, what for you puttin’ up dat shutter over dat window?’ and he say, ‘Herc’les, you put up dat shutter and mind your business. I ain’t tellin’ why I wants it put up; I jest wants it put up, dat’s all.’ No’m, Mis’ ’Lizbeth, I’s often wondered myself about dat shutter, but I never found out nothin’.”

He glanced up at Uncle Jasper’s picture as though expecting some token of approval from the stern, grim face.

Nyoda saw it was no use trying to get anything out of Hercules. Either he really did not know anything, or he would not tell.

“You may go, Hercules,” she said. “That’s all we wanted of you.”

Hercules looked unaccountably relieved and started for the door. Half way across the room he turned and looked long through the clear panel of glass underneath the archway of the gate in the stained glass window. He stood still, seemingly lost in reverie, and quite oblivious to the group about him. Finally his lips began to move, and he began to mutter to himself, and Sahwah’s sharp ears caught the sound of the words.

“Dey’s tings,” muttered the old man, “dat folks don’t want ter look at, and dey’s tings dey dassent look at!”

Still lost in reverie he shuffled out of the room and hobbled painfully downstairs.

CHAPTER V
THE FIRST LINK

“What did old Hercules mean?” asked Sahwah in astonishment. “He said, ‘Dey’s some tings folks don’t want ter look at, and dey’s tings dey dassent look at!’”

“I can’t imagine,” said Nyoda, thoroughly mystified. “But there’s one thing sure, and that is, Uncle Jasper had some very potent reason for putting that shutter over that window, and I more than half believe Hercules knows what it was. Hercules’ explanations always become very fluent when he is not telling the truth. If he really hadn’t known anything about it he probably would have said so simply, in about three words, and without any hesitation. The elaborate details he went into to convince me that he knew nothing about it sounds suspicious to me.

“But I don’t believe the exclamation he made when he went out was intended to deceive me. I think it was the involuntary utterance of what was in his thoughts. He seemed to be thinking aloud, and was quite unconscious of our presence.

“But what a queer thing to say—‘Dey’s tings people dassent look at!’ I wonder what it was that Uncle Jasper dared not look at? Was it something he saw through this window? What is there to be seen out of this window, anyway?” She moved over in front of the window with the others crowding after her to see, too.

Uncle Jasper’s study was at the back of the house and the windows looked out upon the wide open meadow which stretched behind Carver Hill, between the town and the woods. The front of Carver House looked out over the town. Nearly half a mile to the east of Carver Hill another hill rose sharply from the town’s edge. Upon its top stood another old-fashioned dwelling. This hill, crowned with its red brick mansion, was framed in the arch of the gateway in the window like an artist’s picture, with nothing between to obstruct the view. A beautiful picture it was, certainly, and one which could not possibly have any connection with Hercules’ muttered words.

“Who lives in that house?” asked Sahwah.

“I don’t know,” said Nyoda. “It’s way up on the Main Street Hill. I’m not acquainted with the people in that end of town.”

Sherry got out his binoculars and took a look through the window. “Nothing but an old house on a hill,” he reported, and handed the binoculars to Sylvia, that she might take a look through them.

“Why,” said Sylvia after peering intently through the glasses for a minute, “it’s the house Aunt Aggie and I live in! What did that old house have to do with your Uncle Jasper?” she asked wondering. “It’s been empty for many, many years.”

“Oh, wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a romance in your Uncle Jasper’s life?” exclaimed Hinpoha eagerly. “A blighted romance. He never married, did he?”

“No, he never married,” replied Nyoda.

“Then I’m sure it’s a blighted romance!” said Hinpoha enthusiastically. “I just know that some deep tragedy darkened the sun of his life and left him shrouded in gloom forever after!”

Even Nyoda smiled at Hinpoha’s sentimental language, and the rest could not help laughing out loud.

“You sound like Lady Imogen, in ‘The Lost Heiress,’” said Katherine derisively.

“Well, I don’t care, you’ll have to admit that there are some very romantic possibilities, anyway,” said Hinpoha stoutly.

“Yes, and some very prosaic ones, too,” retorted Katherine. “Uncle Jasper probably never married because he was a born bachelor, and preferred to live alone.”

“O Katherine, why are you always taking the joy out of life?” wailed Hinpoha. “It’s lots more fun to think romantic things about people than dull, stupid, everyday things.”

“I think so too,” said Sahwah, unexpectedly coming to the defense of Hinpoha. “I’ve been thinking a lot about old Mr. Carver, living alone here all those years, and I’ve wondered if there wasn’t some reason for it. Certainly something happened that made him put that shutter up, that’s clear.”

“Well, whatever motive the old man may have had for putting it up, we’ll probably never find it out,” said Sherry, gathering up the screws and screwdriver, “inasmuch as he’s dead and it’s no use asking Hercules anything; so we might as well stop puzzling over it. I’ll hunt up something to fill in those screw holes with, Elizabeth, and polish them over.” Sherry, in his matter-of-fact way, had already dismissed the matter from his mind as not worth bothering over.

Not so Nyoda and the Winnebagos. The merest hint of a possible mystery connected with the shutter set them on fire with curiosity and desire to penetrate into its depths.

“I wonder,” said Nyoda musingly, eyeing the massive desk before her with a speculative glance, “if Uncle Jasper left any record of the repairs and improvements which he made to the house while he was the owner. The item of the shutter might be mentioned, with the reason for putting it up.”

“It might,” agreed the Winnebagos.

Nyoda looked around at the litter of odd pieces of furniture crowding the room. “Sherry,” she said briskly, “make up your mind this minute whether you want any of that old stuff, because I’m going to clear it out of here and sell it.”

“A lot of good it would do me to make up my mind to want any of it, if you’ve made up your mind to sell it,” said Sherry in a comically plaintive tone.

“All right,” responded Nyoda tranquilly, “I knew you didn’t want any of it. Boys, will you help Sherry carry out those two tables and that high desk and the chiffonier—all the oak furniture. I’m not keeping anything but the mahogany. Set it out in the hall; I’ll have the furniture man come and get it to-morrow.

“There, now the room looks as it did when Uncle Jasper inhabited it,” she remarked when the extra pieces had been cleared out.

“It certainly was a pleasant room; I don’t see how Uncle Jasper could have maintained such a gloomy disposition as he did, working all day in a room like this. The very sight of that open field out there makes me want to run and shout—and that window! Oh, who could look at it all day long and be crusty and sour?”

“But he had the shutter over the window,” Sahwah reminded her.

“Yes, he did, the poor man!” said Nyoda in a tone of pity. She whisked about the room, straightening out rugs and wiping the dust from the furniture, and soon announced that she was ready to begin investigations. She looked carefully through the desk first, through old account books and files of papers and bills, but came upon nothing that touched upon repairs made to the house. There was a long bookcase running the entire length of one wall, and she tackled this next, while the Winnebagos sat around expectantly and Sylvia looked on from her chair, which she could move herself from place to place, to her infinite delight.

The boys had gone downstairs with Sherry to hear reminiscences from “across.” All three boys worshipped Sherry like a god. To have been “across,” to have seen actual fighting, to have been cited for bravery, and finally to have been shipwrecked, were experiences for which the younger boys would have given their ears, and they treated Sherry with a deferential respect that actually embarrassed him at times.

Nyoda opened the bookcase and began taking out the books that crowded the shelves, opening them one by one and examining their contents. Most of them were works on history, some of them Uncle Jasper’s own; great solid looking volumes with fine print and dingy leather bindings. Ancient history, nearly all of them, and nowhere among them anything so modern as to concern Carver House.

“What a collection of dry-as-dust works to have for your most intimate reading matter!” exclaimed Nyoda, making a wry face at the books. “Not a single book of verse, not a single romance or book of fiction, not the ghost of a love story! There are plenty of them downstairs in the library, that belonged to Uncle Jasper’s father and mother, who must have had quite a lively taste in reading, judging from the books down there; but Hercules told me that Uncle Jasper hadn’t opened the cases down there for twenty-five years. He never read anything but this ancient stuff up here.

“He did write one book that had some life in it, though,” she continued musingly. “That was a story of the life of Elizabeth Carver, his great grandmother, the one whose portrait hangs downstairs over the harp in the drawing-room. He’s got all her various love affairs in it, and it’s anything but dry. I sat up a whole night reading it the time I came across it in the library down below. But from the date of its publishing, Uncle Jasper must have been a very young man when he wrote it, probably before the ancient history spider bit him.”

“And before the shutter went up,” added Sahwah.

“Well,” said Nyoda, after she had peeped into nearly every book in the bookcase, “there doesn’t seem to be anything here more modern than the Fall of Rome, and that’s still several seasons behind the affairs of Carver House. Hello, what’s this?” she suddenly exclaimed, holding up a book she had just picked up, one that had fallen down behind the others on the shelf.

It was a fat, ledger-like volume heavily bound in calfskin. There was no title printed on the back of it and Nyoda opened the cover. Two truly terrifying figures greeted her eyes, drawn in India ink on the yellowed page; figures of two pirates with fiercely bristling mustachios, and brandishing scimitars half as large as themselves. Nyoda quite jumped, their attitude was so menacing. Under one was printed in red ink, “Tad the Terror,” and under the other “Jasper the Feend.” Underneath the two figures was printed in sprawling capitals:

DIERY OF JASPER M. CARVER, ESQWIRE

Nyoda gave a little shriek of laughter and held it up for the Winnebagos to see. “It must be Uncle Jasper’s Diary when he was a boy,” she said. “His youthful idea of a man is a rather bloodthirsty one, according to the portrait, I must say. I suppose ‘Jasper the Feend’ is supposed to be Uncle Jasper. His mustachios bristle more fiercely than the other’s, and his scimitar is longer, so without doubt he was the artist.”

Her eyes ran down the pages following, glancing at the lines of writing, which, having apparently been done in India ink, were still black, although the page on which they were written was yellow with age. As she read, her eyes began to sparkle with interest and enjoyment.

“O girls,” she exclaimed, “this is the best thing I’ve read in ages. Sherry and the boys must see it. I have to go and get lunch started now, but all of you come together after lunch and I’ll read it out loud to you.”

“We’ll all help,” said Migwan, “and then we’ll get through faster,” and the Winnebagos hurried downstairs in Nyoda’s wake.

CHAPTER VI
UNCLE JASPER’S DIARY

After lunch the Winnebagos and the boys gathered around Nyoda in Uncle Jasper’s study to hear her read aloud from “The Diery of Jasper M. Carver, Esqwire.” She held the book up that all might see the portraits of the fearsome pirates, and then turned over to the next page, where the sprawly, uneven writing began, and started to read.

“October 7, 1870. Confined to the house through bad behavior while father and mother have gone to the fair. I wasn’t lonesome though because I had company. A boy ran into the yard chasing a cat and saw me sticking my head out of the upstairs window and blew a bean shooter at me and hit me on the chin and I hit him with an apple core and then he dared me to come out and lick him but I couldn’t go out of the house so I dared him to climb up the porch post and come in the window. He came and I licked him. He is a new boy in town and his name is Sydney Phillips, but he wants to be called Tad. He lives up on Harrison Hill. We are going to be pirates when we grow up. I am going to be Jasper the Feend and he is going to be Tad the Terror. We swore eternul frendship and wrote our names in blood on the attic window sill.”

“Oh, how delicious!” cried Sahwah at the end of the first entry. “Your uncle must have been lots of fun when he was young. What crazy things boys are, anyway! To start out by fighting each other and end up by swearing eternal friendship! Go on, Nyoda, what did they do next?”

Nyoda proceeded.

“November 10, 1870. Tad and I made a great discovery this afternoon. There is a secret passage in this house. It is——”

The concerted shriek of triumph that went up from the Winnebagos forced Nyoda to pause.

“I told you there was!” shouted Sahwah above the rest. “Please hurry and read where it is, I can’t wait another minute!”

Nyoda turned the page and then paused. “The next page is torn out,” she said, holding the book up so they could all see the ragged strip of paper left hanging in the binding, where the page had been torn out.

“Oh, what a shame!” The wail rose on every side.

“Maybe it tells later,” said Sahwah hopefully. “Go on, Nyoda.” The dairy continued on a page numbered six.

“January 4, 1871. Tad and I played pirat to-day. We made a pirat’s den in the secret passage. We are going to hide our chests of money there, all pieces of eight. We haven’t any pieces of eight yet just some red, white and blue dollars we found in the desk drawer in the library. Tad thinks maybe they are patriotick curency they used in the Revolushun”

Nyoda had to wait a minute until Sherry had got done laughing, and then she proceeded:

“February 19, 1871. I am in durrance vile, being locked in my room for a week with nothing to eat but bread and water because I shut Patricia up in the secret passage and went away and forgot all about her because there was a fire. I remembered and let her out as soon as I got home but she had fainted, being a silly girl and afraid of the dark, and she couldn’t scream because we tied a handkerchief over her mouth when we kidnapped her, being pirats. So now I am in durrance vile and cannot see any of my family, not even Tad. But he stands behind the hedge and shoots pieces of candy through my window with the bean shooter and lightens my durrance vile which is what a sworn frend has to do when their names are written in blood on the attic window sill.”

Thus the entries in the scrawling, boyish hand covered page after page, recounting the adventurous and ofttimes seamy career of the two youthful pirates, through all of which the two stood up for each other stanchly, and never, never gave each other away, because they were “sworn frends till deth us do part,” and their names were “written in blood on the attic window sill.”

The entries became farther apart after a while, and the spelling improved until finally there came this announcement:

“Tad and I can’t be pirates any longer. We are going to college next week.”

There the India ink ceased and also the illustrations. After that came page after page of neat entries in faded but still legible blue ink, telling of the progress through college of the two boys; chronicles of the joys, the troubles, the triumphs and the escapades of the two friends, still so inseparable that their names have become a byword among the students and they go by the nickname of David and Jonathan. When one of them gets into trouble the other one still does “what a sworn friend has to do when their names are written in blood on the attic window sill.” The Winnebagos listened with shining eyes while Nyoda read the tale of this remarkable friendship.

The dates of the entries moved forward by months; records of scrapes became fewer and fewer; David and Jonathan had outgrown their colthood and were beginning to win honors with brain and brawn. Then came the record of their graduation and return to Oakwood; of “Tad the Terror” becoming a doctor, of the marriage of Jasper’s sister Patricia to a sea captain; the death of his father and the passing of Carver House into his possession.

Later came the account of a delightful year spent abroad with Tad Phillips, of mountain climbing in the Alps; of browsing among rare old art treasures in France and Italy; of gay larks in Paris. It was always he and Tad, he and Tad; still as loyal to each other as in the days when they wrote their names in blood on the attic window sill.

After the entry which chronicled Jasper’s return to Oakland and settling down in Carver House with his mother, and his enthusiastic adoption of literature as a profession, came an item which made the Winnebagos sit up and listen. It was:

“June 3, 1885. I have had a new window put into my study on the side which faces toward’s Tad’s house on Harrisburg Hill. I had the young Italian artist, Pusini, who has lately come to New York, come and set the glass for me. It is a representation of a charming scene I came across in Italy—an arched gateway covered over with climbing roses. The window is arranged so that through the arch of the gateway I can look directly at Tad’s house. It gives me inspiration in my work.”

“What a beautiful idea!” said Hinpoha, carried away completely by the great love of Jasper Carver for his friend, so simply expressed in his diary.

“So that was Tad’s house, that we are living in!” said Sylvia excitedly. “I wonder where he is now.”

“Go on reading, Nyoda,” said Sahwah, consumed with interest in the tale. “See if he says anything about the shutter.” Nyoda passed on to the next entry.

“June 27, 1885. Went to the Academy of Music in Philadelphia to hear Sylvia Warrington sing. She is the new singer from the South that has created such a furore. The Virginia Nightingale, they call her. What a God-gifted woman she is! There never was such a voice as hers. She sang ‘Hark, hark, the lark,’ and the whole house rose to its feet. She was Spring incarnate. Sylvia Warrington! The name itself is music. I cannot forget her. She is like a lark singing in the desert at dawning.”

A vague remembrance leaped up for an instant in Katherine’s mind and died as it came.

Nyoda read on through pages that recorded Uncle Jasper’s meeting with Sylvia Warrington; his great and growing love for her; his persistent wooing, her consenting to marry him; his wild happiness, which found vent in page after page of rapturous plans for the future. Then came the announcement of Tad’s return from a period of study abroad, and Uncle Jasper’s proud presentation of his bride-to-be. After that Tad’s name appeared in connection with every occasion, still the faithful David to his beloved Jonathan.

Then, almost without warning, the great friendship ran on the rocks and was shattered. For Tad no sooner saw Sylvia Warrington than he too, fell madly in love with her. A brief and bitter entry told how she finally broke her engagement to Uncle Jasper and married Tad, and how Uncle Jasper, beside himself with grief and disappointment, turned against his friend and hated him with the undying hate that is born of jealousy. With heavy strokes of the pen that cut the paper he wrote down his determination to have no more friends and to live to himself thereafter. Then, in a shaky hand in marked contrast to the fierce strokes just above, he wrote: “But Sylvia—I love her still. I can’t help it.” That shaky handwriting stood as a mute testimonial to his heart’s torment, and Nyoda, reading it after all these years, felt a sympathetic spasm of pain pass through her own heart at the sight of that wavering entry.

“It’s just like a story in a book!” exclaimed Hinpoha, furtively drying her eyes, which had overflowed during the reading of the last page. “The beautiful lady, and the rival lovers, and the disappointed one never marrying. Oh, it’s too romantic for anything! Oh, please hurry and read what comes next.”

Nyoda turned the page and read the brief entry:

“I have taken up the study of ancient history as a serious pursuit. In it I hope to find forgetfulness.”

The eyes of the Winnebagos traveled to the bookcase, and now they knew why there was nothing there but dull old books in heavy bindings, and why Uncle Jasper Carver hated love stories.

The next entry had them all sitting up again.