narrow panel below the pen-box fell away, and revealed a
quite unsuspected secret drawer. She opened it in much excitement.
Inside lay a folded sheet of foolscap paper. Her exclamation had called
Lilias and Dulcie from the other side of the room, and all three girls
admired and wondered at the contrivance of the secret drawer. Together
they took out the sheet of paper, unfolded it, and bent their heads over
it.

"Why, it's Grandfather's writing!" exclaimed Lilias as she read the
first words:--

"This is the last will and testament of me Leslie Ingleton of Cheverley
Chase near Balderton."

"It's surely not another will?" fluttered Dulcie.

Carmel said nothing; her eyes were devouring the contents of the paper.
She read it through carefully to the end, then she asked:

"What was the date of the will in which Grandfather left the Chase to
me? Was it not some time in January? Well, this is certainly a later
date. It must have been signed the very day before he died!"

"Does it make any difference?" inquired Dulcie breathlessly.

Carmel had taken the paper away from her cousins, and stood in the
window mastering the meaning of the legal language. She read a certain
passage over and over again carefully before she answered. Then she
looked out through the study window--that window with its wonderful
view over the whole range of the Ingleton property--she gazed at the
gardens and woods and fields that for more than a year had been hers,
and hers alone, the estate which to claim as heiress she had been
brought from her Sicilian home.

"All the difference in the world," she said quietly. "Grandfather
changed his mind at the last, and left the Chase to Everard after all!"

"To Everard?"

"Oh, Carmel!"

"Are you certain?"

"Can there be any mistake?"

"Is the will properly signed? Let me look! Yes, it seems signed and
witnessed, as far as I can tell!"

"What are you going to do?"

"Shall I ring up Mr. Bowden?"

"Not yet, please," begged Carmel. "Leave me a moment!"

She was still standing gazing out through the window over the English
woods and meadows that she had grown to love so dearly, those wide acres
of which any one might have been proud. At last she turned round and
answered:

"I am going now to tell the news to the rightful owner of the Chase."

Everard was sitting in the stone summer-house in the garden, struggling
with a difficult problem in mathematics, when suddenly through the
ivy-framed do