e it appraised, or
whatever they call it, so he did; and when the check from the antique
shop came it was a big one.

It wasn't long after that that Lady Crusoe called on me. It was a real
call, and she left a card. And she said as she laid it on the table: "As
I told you, I'd rather the rest of the natives didn't know--they haven't
seen me since I was a child, and they think that I am just some stranger
who rents the old place and who wants to be alone."

After she had gone I picked up the card, and what I read there nearly
took my breath away. There are certain names which mean so much that we
get to look upon them as having special significance. The name that was
on Lady Crusoe's card had always stood in my mind for money--oceans of
it. I simply couldn't believe my eyes, and I took it down to Billy.

"Look at that," I said, and laid it before him, "and she has asked us to
supper for next Sunday!"

Well, we couldn't make anything of it. Why was a woman with a name like
that down here with nothing to eat but the things that William Watters
could forage for, and that Billy could supply from his little store, and
that she paid for with Sheffield trays?

We had supper that Sunday night in the great dining-room. There was a
five-branched candlestick with tall white candles in the center of the
shining mahogany table and William Watters acted as butler. You never
would have believed how well he did it. And after supper we had coffee
on the front porch and looked out over the hills at the sunset, and the
silver moon and the old toad came out from under his stone and sat with
us.

Lady Crusoe was in a thin white dress which she had made for herself,
and she talked of the old place and of her childhood there. But not a
word did she say of why she had come back to live alone on the Davenant
ancestral acres.

It was her mother, we learned, who was a Davenant, and it was her
mother's father who was the old admiral. She said nothing of the man
whose name was on her card. It was as if she stopped short when she came
to that part of her life, or as if it had never been.

She took me up-stairs after a while and left Billy to smoke on the
porch. She said that she had something that she wanted me to see. Her
room was a huge square one at the southwest corner of the house. There
was a massive four-poster bed with faded blue satin curtains, and there
was a fireplace with fire-dogs and an Adam screen. Lady Crusoe carried a
candl