hat to think, and they all presently
went to the pond, and watched the creatures flashing up their golden
sides, each wondering all the time what the two others were thinking
of. Then as it was nearly lunch time, Amelia and Laura proceeded to
leave the dell, Brandon attending them and helping them up the steps. He
was rather vexed that he had not been able to say his say and give Laura
a certain packet that he had in his possession; and as the afternoon
presently clouded over and it began to pour with rain, he hardly knew
what to do with himself till the bright idea occurred to him that he
would ask Mrs. Melcombe to show him the old house.

Up and down stairs and into a good many rooms they all three proceeded
together. Hardly any pictures to found a question or a theory on; no old
china with a story belonging to it; no brown books that had been loved
by dead Melcombes. This could not have been a studious race. Not a
single anecdote was told of the dead all the time they went over the
place, till at last Mrs. Melcombe unlocked the door of a dark,
old-fashioned sitting-room upstairs, and going to the shutters opened
one of them, saying, "This is the room in which the dear old grandmother
spent the later years of her life."

This really was an interesting old room. Laura and Amelia folded back
the shutters with a genuine air of reverence and feeling. It was most
evident that they had loved this woman whose son had forbidden her to
leave her property to him.

Two or three dark old pictures hung on the walls, and there was a
cabinet on which Laura laying her hand, said--

"The dear grandmother kept all her letters here."

"Indeed," Brandon answered; "it must have been very interesting to you
to look them over. (And yet," he thought "you don't look as if you had
found in them anything of much interest.")

"We have never opened it," said Mrs. Melcombe. "Mr. Mortimer, when he
was here, proposed to look over and sort all the letters for me, but I
declined his offer."

("And no doubt made him miserable by so doing") was Brandon's next
thought.

"I shall keep the key for my dear boy," she continued, "and give it to
him when he comes of age."

("To find out something that he will wish he didn't know.") thought
Brandon again. ("That cabinet, as likely as not, contains the evidence
of _it_, whatever _it_ is.")

"And in this gallery outside," she proceeded, "the dear grandmother used
to walk every day."

Brandon percei