p nor answer.

After he had gone Mary took up the photograph, seated herself once more
in the chair, and studied the picture for a long time. Then she rose
and, lamp in hand, left the room, tiptoed along the hall past the door
of Captain Shadrach's room, and up the narrow stairs to the attic, her
old playground.

Her playthings were there still, arranged in her customary orderly
fashion along the walls. Rose and Rosette and Minnehaha and the other
dolls were seated in their chairs or the doll carriage or with their
backs against Shadrach's old sea chest. She had never put them away out
of sight. Somehow it seemed more like home to her, the knowledge that
though she would never play with them again, they were there waiting
for her in their old places. While she was away at school they had been
covered from the dust by a cloth, but now the cloth had been taken away
and she herself dusted them every other morning before going up to the
store. As Shadrach said, no one but Mary-'Gusta would ever have thought
of doing such a thing. She did, because she WAS Mary-'Gusta.

However, the dolls did not interest her now. She tiptoed across the
garret floor, taking great care to avoid the boards which creaked most,
and lifted the lid of the old trunk which she had first opened on that
Saturday afternoon nearly ten years before. She found the pocket on
the under side of the lid, opened it and inserted her hand. Yes, the
photograph of Hall and Company was still there, she could feel the edge
of it with her fingers.

She took it out, and closed the pocket and then the trunk, and tiptoed
down the stairs and to her room again. She closed the door, locked
it--something she had never done in her life before--and placing
the photograph she had taken from the trunk beside that sent her by
Crawford, sat down to compare them.

And as she looked at the two photographs her wonder at Isaiah's odd
behavior ceased. It was not strange that when he saw Mr. Edwin Smith's
likeness he was astonished; it was not remarkable that he could scarcely
be convinced the photograph was not that of the mysterious Ed Farmer.
For here in the old, yellow photograph of the firm of "Hall and Company,
Wholesale Fish Dealers," was Edgar S. Farmer, and here in the photograph
sent her by Crawford was Edwin Smith. And save that Edgar S. Farmer
was a young man and Edwin Smith a man in the middle sixties, they were
almost identical in appearance. Each time she had seen Mr