wish I did. I've wondered and
wondered. No matter how hard I think, it doesn't somehow come right.
It's like shattering a cherished crystal into fragments to think that
every tie of blood and country I valued is meaningless--that every
memory is a mockery--that grandfather and you and Aunt Agatha--" she
paused and sighed. "When I try to realize," she finished, "I feel very
lonely and afraid."

"And Philip?" hinted Carl.

"I don't think he is pleased."

"You're right," said Carl with decision. "It upset him a lot. But
that night by the old chief's camp fire, Philip discovered--"

"Yes?"

"That some imperfection in the stilted wording of the hidden paper had
led us all astray. Philip said he could not be sure--there was so much
fuss and trouble and misunderstanding--but the old chief had nursed
Theodomir through some dreadful illness and knew it all. They were
staunch friends. Norman Westfall came into the Glades hunting with a
friend. He persuaded your mother to go away with him, but they
went--_alone_!"

"You mean--"

"That they did not take a child away from the Indian village as the
paper in the candlestick declares--"

"And the daughter of Theodomir?"

"Is Keela. They left her by the old chief's wigwam."

Diane stared.

CHAPTER XLIX

MR. DORRIGAN

Carl, traveling north after a day of earnest discussion in his cousin's
camp, thought much of the second candlestick. Since that night in
Philip's wigwam, it had haunted him persistently. Now with Diane's
permission to probe its secret--if, indeed, it had one like its charred
companion--he was fretting again, as he had intermittently fretted in
the lodge of Mic-co, at the train of circumstances that had interposed
delay.

Train and taxi were perniciously slow. Carl found his patience taxed
to the utmost.

The grandfather's clock was booming eight when at length, after a
gauntlet of garrulous servants, he pushed back the great, iron-bound
doors of the old Spanish room in his cousin's house and entered. The
war-beaten slab of table-wood, the old lanterns, the Spanish grandee
above the mantel, the mended candlestick and its unmarred mate, all
brought memories of another night when Starrett's glass had struck the
marble fireplace. Vividly, too, he recalled how the firelight had
stained the square-paneled ceiling of oak overhead, and how Diane had
stood in the doorway. The room was the same. It was a little hard,
however, to reconcil