e still standing,
forlorn, unkempt, apparently deserted, and quite unchanged since I knew
it, I was still more astonished. But when I noticed the little door in
the boarding standing open, I resolved to begin my investigations right
there, and I boldly went up and knocked. Then Miss Joyce came out and
announced that a member of the Collingwood family was here on business.
That, too, seemed incredible, as I remembered no surviving member of the
family. Discretion, however, seemed to me the better part of valor, and
I decided to give the name that I had borne during my first years in
California, till I could ascertain more definitely just what the
situation was.

"So I came in--as Mr. Arthur Calthorpe--and the mystery deepened tenfold
when I saw this old room all lit up precisely as I had remembered it so
many years ago. It so carried me back into my youth that, for a few
moments, I quite lost track of the present. And when I came to the old
piano, the impulse seized me to play a few bars and hum the lines of a
little song I had once composed for my mother. I had at that time rather
a gift for music, and this song was a sort of secret of ours-- I never
sang or played it for any one else. And she remembered it!

"Well, you know the rest!--" And he stopped abruptly. They all drew long
breaths of relaxed tension.

"There's something that has puzzled me all along," began Joyce, at last.
"I wonder if Mrs. Collingwood would object to my asking about it?"

"No, indeed, dear child," replied that lady. "Have no hesitation in
asking what you wish."

"It's this, then. I have often and often wondered why you never came
back to this beautiful old home, or at least sent for the books and
pictures and lovely things that were going to ruin here. Did you never
think of it?"

"I do not wonder that you ask," answered Mrs. Collingwood, "for it must
have seemed very strange to an outsider. Of course, for the first few
years, my anger had been so great, and my grief was still so terrible,
that I felt I could never, never look upon the place or anything in it
again. Then, as you have heard, I willed the house itself and the land
to the Southern Society, as I had no one to whom I wished to leave it,
and my means were sufficient, so that I did not need to sell it. As the
years passed on, however, and my feelings altered, I did begin to think
it a pity that the place should run to neglect and ruin.

"So strong did this conviction become, t