there. The silks are in the
bottom of the trunk, wrapped in a piece of old, yellow muslin. We might
as well find out whether the material is still good before we decide
what we will do about it. I must go back now to my jelly; it must be
nearly done."

"Come up to the attic with me, won't you, Eleanor?" invited Madge.

Eleanor shook her head. She knew her cousin liked best to make these
visits to her mother's trunk alone. "No," she answered, "I must help
Mother with the jelly."

Nellie slipped quietly away and left Madge looking dreamily out on the
elm-shaded lawn, her thoughts busy with the story of her own past and
the little she knew of her father.

He had been a captain in the United States Navy, and one of the
youngest officers in the service. The Mortons were an old Virginia
family, and after Robert Morton's graduation from Annapolis he was
rapidly promoted in the service. He had married Mrs. Butler's only
sister, Eleanor, for whom Nellie was named. Two months after Madge's
birth, while her husband was away on a cruise, Madge's mother died at
her sister's home, and, as her father never came back to claim her, she
had been brought up by her uncle and aunt. This was all she had been
told of the story of her mother and father. It made her aunt unhappy to
talk of them, so Madge had asked few questions as she grew to young
womanhood. But to-day she felt that she would like to know whether her
father had died and been buried at sea--she always thought of him as
dead--or whether a tablet had ever been erected to his memory at
Annapolis. She had never been to Annapolis, although it was not a great
distance from Miss Tolliver's school, but she knew that the Government
often honored its brave officers and sailors with these memorials.

She was thinking of these things as she left the dining room and
climbed the steep, ladder-like stairs that led to the attic. The attic
of "Forest House" was worth a longer journey than Madge had to make. It
was built of solid cedar wood, with beams a foot thick over head, and
put together with great cedar pegs. The attic was a long, low-ceilinged
room, dark and fragrant with the odor of the cedar. It was lit by four
big, old-fashioned dormer windows in the front and four in the rear.

Her mother's trunk was kept in one corner of the attic behind an old
oak chest. Mrs. Butler did not wish to be haunted by sad memories when
she made her frequent trips to her attic to look after the fami