A few weeks passed with no excitement except Cynthia’s withdrawal from the Amen Corner. Madame was very indignant when Mr. Mudge reported Cynthia’s part in inviting the boys to attend our Catacomb party, and assisting them in entering and disguising themselves. It was rumoured that Cynthia was to be publicly expelled as a terrible example to all would-be offenders. She remained closeted in her room, whence the sound of weeping and wailing could be heard behind her locked door, but she steadily refused all overtures of sympathy on our part. We waited upon Madame in a body, and begged her to pardon Cynthia. Madame replied that she would consider the matter, and we hurried back and shouted the hopeful news through Cynthia’s keyhole. There was no reply.

“Do you think she has killed herself?” Milly asked in an awestruck whisper.

I applied my ear closely and heard stealthy steps. “She merely wishes to be let alone,” I said; “perhaps we are a little too exuberant in our expressions of sympathy.”

Miss Noakes entered presently and announced that Madame wished to see Cynthia; and that young lady went, with a very red nose, turned up at a very haughty angle. She returned shortly, and addressing herself to Adelaide, as she always did, even when she had something which she wished to communicate to the rest of us, said scornfully:

“Miss Armstrong, will you kindly say to the other young ladies [we were all present], that Madame has just told me that I am indebted to you for permission to remain and graduate with the class.”

A murmur of satisfaction ran around the room.

Cynthia’s eyes flashed fire. “Do not imagine for one moment,” she exclaimed, “that I would accept your hypocritical condescension, if I believed that it had been offered.”

“Don’t you believe that we interceded with Madame?” Winnie asked.

“I believe,” Cynthia replied, “that you have done the best you can, by tale-bearing, to induce Madame to expel me, and have not succeeded; and as I do not wish to associate with you any longer, I have written my parents asking them to withdraw me from the school.”

“I am sure no one will regret your departure,” Adelaide replied, with indignation. But Cynthia did not leave the school. Either her parents were too sensible to take her away just before her graduation, or her remark had been merely an idle threat. Madame gave her a room in another part of the building, and her place in the Amen Corner remained vacant for the rest of the term.

Winnie had finished her essay, and one evening we gathered in the little study parlor to hear her read it. The time for our parting was now very near, and we were all more or less sentimentally inclined. The old Amen Corner was very dear to us. Every piece of furniture had its associations, but none of them were quite so tragical as those which clustered around the old oak cabinet, and it seemed only fitting that Winnie should celebrate it in her parting essay. She apologized for the length of her paper. “Don’t think, girls,” she explained, “that I intend to read all this at commencement. I am going to ask Madame to make selections from it. The task that Professor Waite set me was to give a picture of Florentine life in the early part of the sixteenth century, and to bring in the characters who lived then as naturally as I could—Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Fra Bartolommeo, the Medici, Macchiavelli, Bibbiena and his niece, and others. While I was writing, my imagination carried me away, and I gave it free rein. You are the only ones who will have the full dose.”

We were very willing to hear it all. Winnie sat in the great comfortable wicker armchair with the lamplight gloating o’er her mischievous face. Adelaide had ensconced herself on the window seat, her classical profile clear cut against the night. Milly nestled on a cushion at her feet, and I had stretched myself luxuriously on the old lounge, and watched the others from the shadowy side of the room. Milly occasionally patted the cabinet at her side as Winnie referred to it.

The flickering light almost seemed to make the carved faces with which it was decorated grin sardonically, or knit their brows with threatening scowls, as Winnie read:

 

“I am the ghost of the cabinet, Giovanni de’ Medici they called me, in 1475, when the drops from the font fell on my forehead in the Baptistry in Florence, and Leo X, when in 1513 I was made Pope of Rome. I was the second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Christianly christened as a babe and created Abbot of Fontedolce at the age of seven and Cardinal at seventeen, for my father was convinced, since the eldest son must carry down the family glory in succession, for me promotion lay only in the way of the Church.

“Nevertheless, I held, as it were, to that plough but with one hand, continually looking back, and ready to drop it altogether, so that, while I enjoyed the rank and revenue of a prince of the Church, I was not made a priest with vows of celibacy until the papacy was as good as in my hand, and until I had been determined thereunto by the closing to me of a fair pathway which led in quite another direction. For of my father’s choice for me I might have said:

“None but the readers of this confession know of my lost love or fancy that I was capable of any passion save the ambition to reinstate my family in its ancient position of glory in Florence. Cardinal though I was, I yet played the spy and the thief to get at the opinions of Florentines of note and influence, and one of my confederates in my schemes was a certain carved oak cabinet, which stood in the library of the palazzo of my nephew by marriage, Filippo Strozzi. This Strozzi was a man so well regarded in Florence, that although he espoused Maddalena de’ Medici, the daughter of my banished brother Piero, yet was he never suspected of any plots to advance our family, and lived even with great freedom and popularity, keeping open house to all the literati of the city.

“My niece, who shared not altogether the republican sentiments of her husband, and in whom family affection was most deeply rooted, did sometimes entertain me after my banishment when my presence in Florence was not known by the Florentines in general or even to her most worshipful spouse. At such times I had for my bedchamber a little room partitioned only from the library of which I have spoken by heavy hangings of tapestry. Against this tapestry, on the library side, was set the oak cabinet, which was also a desk for writing, and here my nephew, Filippo Strozzi, was accustomed to write his letters. Hearing the scratch of his pen when he little suspected my neighbourhood, filled me with such an itching desire to know what he wrote, that one night after he had finished his writing, and had left the room, I slipped into the library, and found that, having completed his epistle, he had laid it inside the cabinet, and that this was without doubt the usual rendezvous for the letters of the family while awaiting the time for the departure of the post, for other letters, sealed and directed and ready for the sending, lay on the same shelf. On further examination of the cabinet I found that its back was a sliding panel, and that by cutting through the tapestry with my penknife I could open the cabinet from my own room, and abstract any letters which might have been placed within it under surety of lock and key. This seemed to me a most providential circumstance, for not only did my nephew write his letters here, but other guests of the house had the same custom, and it was most convenient for me thus to become acquainted with their secret opinions.

“I had another motive for lingering in Florence besides my political schemes, for as I have said I had not at this time so irrevocably fastened upon myself the vows of the church that they could not be shaken off, and I was greatly enamoured of the niece of the merry Cardinal Bibbiena, the incomparable Maria, whom I had met before my brother’s banishment at his court in Florence, she being a maid in waiting to his wife and greatly attached to her.

“Maria Bibbiena came frequently to visit my niece Maddalena Strozzi; and my niece, knowing my passion, gave me opportunity of meeting her, and I thought that I sped well in my wooing until the cabinet told me otherwise. My cabinet told me no lies, for Count Baltazar Castiglione, a most polished man of the world, and guarded in his spoken opinions of others, opened his mind most frankly in a letter to his friend and confidante, the gentle and witty Vittoria Colonna, which he wrote in that room and left in my power, and which was expressed with a freedom which he would never have allowed himself had he fancied that it would ever have fallen under my eye.

“I had one friend in Florence in whom I trusted, Niccolo Macchiavelli. I admired his statecraft and his policy, and I deemed him devoted to our family, but a letter from his own hand, obtained in like manner with the others, showed him to be two-faced and treacherous to all who trusted him—to the Medicis and to Strozzi, whose hospitality he scrupled not to abuse. It would seem at first sight that my thefts of letters were of service to me; but I was never able to really profit by them, and the knowledge which the letters gave me of the perfidy or dislike of their writers caused me only fruitless indignation and lasting pain, while the habit into which I had fallen of suspecting, prying, and stealing grew upon me day by day, till even death itself was powerless to correct it. When will mankind learn that habit can be so deeply fixed as to follow us beyond the portals of death.

“The old cabinet and I have been so long partners in guilt that my erring ghost visits it as of old, abstracting from it whatever is left to its treacherous keeping. I give back herewith the letters, and when this confession shall have been publicly read, I will render the moneys which I have more lately filched, and then my troubled spirit will be laid at rest. For I was not a great villain.

“Witch Winnie lied when she said I stole from this cabinet the freedom of the city of Florence, which my father writ out and placed here after the last visit of the unmannerly monk, Savonarola. I pardoned the enemies of our family in the day of my triumph, and I pardoned Raphael, yea, and befriended him and loved him, since he wronged me unwittingly; and none grieved more than I when we buried him beside his Maria, whom I fain would have called my own. And so, having forgiven those who have trespassed against me, and now making restitution, may I also be pardoned for filching these few letters, whereof the first was from:

“It was this last letter which broke my heart, and yet did not so much break as bend it so that I gave up the hope which I could no longer keep not in bitterness or in wrath, and resigned myself to my destiny as monk and pope; when Maria Bibbiena died, all too early, I wept not my own shattered future alone, but Raphael’s as well, and so took him to my heart, though he knew not the reason, and so I beseech the efficacious prayers of all Christians for all true lovers.

“Et pro nobis Christum Exora.
“Giovanni de’ Medici,
“The Ghost of the Cabinet.”

Winnie’s romance of the cabinet pleased us all, but Adelaide was sure that Madame would not allow it to be read without certain changes, especially the reference to the robbery in the school, and the “lovering” parts.

“You need not imagine,” said Milly, “that because you object to lovering, all the rest of the world does. Why, even Miss Noakes has a softer heart than Adelaide’s. But really and truly, Winnie, how much of that is true? Was Raphael really engaged?”

“Most certainly, my dear.”

“And did Leo X love her too? You made me ever so sorry for the poor old pope.”

“Well, no, that part is the only one for which I have no warrant in history. That is, I have no doubt that Leo X really did love some one before he took the irrevocable vows. He was what Browning calls

“The cabinet is such an uncanny old thing,” said Milly, “that I begin almost to believe that you have divined the truth, and that an uneasy spirit really haunts its vicinity.”

“Perhaps the fact that we now only keep school books in the cabinet is the reason the ghost has been so very quiet of late,” said Winnie. “Or, perhaps it has repented its evil deeds and my essay has given it the peace of conscience which only comes through confession. If it were an unrepenting spirit it would, as Milly suggests, be very unwilling that I should publish its evil deeds by reading this essay. I believe that I will give it an opportunity of showing whether it approves of my reading its confessions. Here, Tib, take everything else off your shelf, and I will lay my essay there and call on the spirit to make away with it, if, indeed, he is able and wicked enough to do it.”

Adelaide, Milly, and I watched the incantation with much amusement.

“Guilty ghost,” exclaimed Winnie, striking an attitude, “if you have repented of your crimes, and the reading of this essay will allow you henceforth to rest in peace, I hereby exorcise you, and command you to affix some seal of your approval to this paper—either the print of a bloody hand or at least X your mark.” Hereupon Winnie, with a flourish, laid her essay on my shelf and closed the cabinet door. “If, guilty ghost,” she continued, “you are still up to your tricks, and having taken the money which Tib confided to her shelf, are determined to go on in your evil ways, I hereby dare you to steal that essay within the next half hour, we keeping watch and ward in this room!”

“I think it is no fair test,” I said, “unless you leave it there overnight. Both of the other robberies were committed just at midnight. This ghost may be of a bashful disposition, or possibly not good-natured enough to walk at your call in broad daylight.”

“Well, if he doesn’t appear within a half hour I’ll give him another chance, ‘in the dead vast and middle of the night,’ ‘when churchyards yawn,’ et-cetera. Here, Milly, lend me your watch, that I may time our visitor.”

We all sat for a few moments silently watching the cabinet, but presently Adelaide tired of this mummery and exclaimed:

“Really, this is too absurd! I have my Latin prose composition to write, and cannot spend any more time in such nonsense, Winnie.”

“Write your exercise in this room. We will all keep still, and I must have all the Amen Corner as witnesses of my little experiment.”

Winnie pulled out the writing shelf, and Adelaide seated herself at the cabinet and wrote steadily until Winnie cried, “Time’s up.”

Milly and I approached the cabinet, and Winnie made a few magical passes in the air and repeated an ancient hocus-pocus:

Adelaide pushed in the writing shelf and stepped aside, and Winnie threw open the cabinet door. We could hardly believe our eyes—the essay had disappeared.

Milly gave a shriek of dismay. “It must have been a ghost. How else could it have vanished with all of us on the watch?”

“Have you been playing a trick on me, Adelaide?” Winnie asked. “Did you manage to slip it out while we were not looking?”

Adelaide disclaimed any such action, and Milly and I confirmed her assertion, for we had been watching the door all the time.

Winnie wheeled the cabinet away from the wall, almost expecting to find a concealed door opening into Cynthia’s room. But the wall was perfectly solid, there was not even a mouse hole in the base-board, while the back of the cabinet was not a sliding panel. We banged it, and pushed it, and examined it with a magnifying glass for concealed springs or hinges. It was simply an honest piece of work, a secure, heavy back, conspicuously fastened in its place with wooden pegs, a construction to which cabinet makers give the term dowelling, and to make assurance doubly sure, the edges had been glued with a cement which had turned black with age, but had not cracked. There was no possible way in which the cabinet could have been opened from behind.

“There goes my pet theory,” said Winnie, in an aggrieved tone. “It would have been just like Cynthia to have removed things from the back of the cabinet, if we could only have discovered a concealed door in the partition behind it. You see the cabinet backs so conveniently against her room.”

But there was no possibility of any door having ever existed here. The partition wall was not of boards, which might have been sawed through and removed. It was clean white plaster which had never been papered, and would have betrayed the least scratch, and Winnie was obliged to relinquish this romantic method of access to the cabinet.

“I shall always think,” said Adelaide, “that the first robbery was committed by that individual we saw through the studio transom in Professor Waite’s great Rembrandt hat.”

Winnie laughed heartily. “Girls, I may as well confess,” she exclaimed, “that was your humble servant.”

“You, Winnie?”

“Yes, I, Winnie. Don’t you remember that I was not in the parlor when the head appeared? I was in the studio, and it struck me that it would be rather a good joke to pretend to be Professor Waite, tramping up and down before that door, tormented by a consuming passion for Adelaide. Wait, I will put the hat on again and let you see.” Winnie dashed into the studio and returned wearing the Rembrandt hat, and we all laughed at her cavalier appearance.

“But, girls,” she exclaimed, throwing the hat on the floor, “this is really no laughing matter. Do you realize that my essay is gone? My essay that I am to read next week. And how I am ever to find time to write it over again, with examinations and all that I have to do between now and then, is more than I know. Just see how wickedly Giovanni de’ Medici leers at me!” and Winnie pointed to the carved head which adorned the centre of the cabinet door. “Oh! what shall I do? what shall I do?”

Winnie soon answered that question for herself, by writing another essay, and improving it in the process. But the disappearance of the Florentine letters was a nine days’ wonder. We searched the room thoroughly and even stepped out on the fire-escape and looked up and down for some bird of heaven that might have carried them away. “I shall always maintain,” said Milly, “that it is no real thief at all. Of course, none of us really believe in the ghost theory, though it is almost enough to make one turn spiritualist to be made the victim of such a trick. I believe that in the end it will be found that somebody’s little pet poodle has found his way in here, and like Old Mother Hubbard’s dog has a weakness for cupboards, and has chewed up everything that he has found. Sometime Nemesis will overtake that little poodle and he will be laid upon the dissecting table, and all of the money and Winnie’s essay will be found in his little gizzard.”

It was an absurd suggestion, but nothing seemed to explain the mystery, and we finally all gave it up. All but Winnie. She continued to worry about it. She laid many traps for her ghost, baiting them with edibles under the supposition that the thief might be an animal; and with money, tying silken threads around the cabinet, fastening the handle of the door to a bell in her own room, but they were all unavailing; the robber came no more.

The cadets’ prize declamation came before our graduation, and we all attended the exercises.

Stacey did not take a prize, but, as he laughingly told Milly, his coat did, and that was honour enough.

Woodpecker was the honour man that day, and as Woodpecker was a poor man’s son, he had no dress suit, and Stacey lent him his coat to appear in while he delivered his oration—Stacey sitting in his shirt sleeves behind the scenes meantime. Woodpecker’s long arms soared and the stitches in the back cracked, but he spoke with fire, and the committee unanimously awarded his “Description of a Chariot Race” the first prize, while Buttertub’s sonorous voice and grandiloquent manner secured the second for his “Philosophy of Socrates,” and Stacey’s “Athletic Games of Greece” came off with an “honourable mention” only. There was a good deal of what Jim called “kicking” at this decision. The drum corps, to a man, felt that Stacey ought to have had the first prize, and there was not a boy in the school, not excepting Buttertub, who did not think Stacey’s essay infinitely more entertaining than the Socratic philosophy. The Commodore, fortunately, was of this opinion. Stacey’s stock had risen rapidly in his father’s estimate. The essay interested the Commodore, and it made no difference to him that the committee did not agree with him; in his opinion Stacey was the brightest boy in the school. We girls shared this feeling. Stacey’s bouquets proclaimed him the most popular fellow in the class. The usher kept bringing them up, and it was impossible for Stacey to carry all his floral tributes from the stage at one time.

Woodpecker enjoyed the popularity of his friend more than his own honors. He had laid a wager with Ricos that Stacey would carry off the first prize, promising that if he did not, he, Woodpecker, would trundle a wheelbarrow down Fifth Avenue. Having lost the wager by his own triumph Woodpecker gaily proceeded to pay the penalty by carrying Stacey’s bouquets in a light wheelbarrow to the Buckingham Hotel—where Commodore and Mrs. Fitz Simmons had taken rooms—immediately after the exercises.

Stacey himself did not overestimate this expression of his friend’s regard, but it helped soften his disappointment at not obtaining the first prize. He was not embittered as at his failure at the games, but humbled in a salutary way. He saw his true position: a talented fellow, who until recently had not tried to make the best use of his opportunities, and who could not reasonably hope for the highest rewards after such brief effort. But something within him whispered, “You can do it yet. You can be something more than a dude and a good fellow,” and he resolved to devote his vacation to serious training in his studies.

It gave him a thrill of pleasure, strangely mingled with humility, to see the Commodore’s delight, just as he was handing Mrs. Fitz Simmons into the carriage, at hearing the old cry from the drum corps, who had been lined up in front of the barracks by Buttertub for that purpose, and gave it with a will—Jim’s shrill voice joining in the final cheer:

“Who’s Fitz Simmons?”

The Roseveldts were coming down the steps, and Milly heard it too, and waved her handkerchief, and Stacey opened the carriage door and waved his hat to her—though the drum corps thought it was in acknowledgment of their salute, and closing round Woodpecker and his wheelbarrow escorted him down the Avenue.

There were tears in Mrs. Fitz Simmons’s eyes as she pressed her husband’s hand, and the Commodore, not wishing to show his satisfaction too plainly, asked who that pretty girl was who waved her handkerchief so enthusiastically.

“You don’t deserve it, you young dog,” he asserted. “Now if she had smiled in that way at me I would have cared more for it than for all the hullabaloo those young rascals are making.”

“Perhaps I do,” was the reply on Stacey’s lips, but it was uttered so quietly that only his mother heard it, and understood as mothers always do.

And then through the days that followed, Stacey buckled down to hard work again, and won, as such work is sure to win, its reward.

“Passed his examinations, admitted to Harvard! Why, of course,” said the Commodore. “There never was any doubt of it.” But Stacey knew that there had been great doubt, and that the expression of esteem by which he was held by his classmates, which had pleased his father so much, was a very slight thing compared to this quiet victory, gained through hours of unregarded toil and for which no cheers were shouted or flowers borne after him in noisy triumph.

The opening of the college gates was the entering of a better race for Stacey. He felt that he was now indeed a man, and must put away childish things.

We of the Amen Corner had been chatting together, the evening before our commencement, of what we intended to do during vacation. “First of all,” said Adelaide, “I want some home life. I want to get acquainted with my own mother. I feel now that we can be companionable. I am not very learned, it is true, but I am certainly more mature than when we were together last. I ought to be not only a help to her, but a sort of comrade. She has kept herself young at heart, and her society will recompense me in part for the loss of yours. We are going to study music seriously together. She plays my accompaniments very nicely. Indeed, I think she has more talent than I have, only she is out of practice, and her repertoire is a little old-fashioned, but it will be very easy for her to put herself in touch with modern requirements. Then father has planned a delightful occupation for me. You know how fond I am of practical architecture. Well, he has purchased a delightful old colonial mansion in Deerfield, a charming village in western Massachusetts. It is an old homestead which has fallen into disrepair from having been long unoccupied, for the family which once inhabited it have all died. The one distant relative who owns the place lives in the West, and has sold it to father. I am to have the direction of all the repairs and restorations, and I mean to truly restore the old house to its original condition. We will board in the village while the changes are being made. It will be just the place for Jim to grow strong in. Father writes that it has the loveliest elm-shaded street, and a hundred different drives over the hills and along its three rivers.”

“You need not tell us anything about Deerfield,” Winnie interrupted. “Tib and I drove through the old town on our coaching trip. It is the most charming spot that I ever saw. I congratulate you on having such a delightful prospect before you.”

“And I hereby invite you all to come to the hanging of the crane when my restorations are finished,” Adelaide continued cordially. “That will be in September, I think, for they will take all summer at least, and you’ve no idea how I shall enjoy planning everything and directing the workmen. Jim and I are going to carve some of the woodwork ourselves. We will have a portico like that at Mount Vernon, with Ionic columns, and the windows will have tiny panes and broad seats, and there are to be china closets with glass doors, and fan work carved over the mantelpieces, and a raftered ceiling with a great ‘summer-tree’ in the ‘keeping room.’ I shall enjoy it more than I can make you understand. I don’t mean so much the possession of the house when it is done, as altering it, for I love architecture, and wish I could be an architect. So much for my plans. What are yours, Tib?”

“Work,” I replied; “solid work.”

“I knew you would say that,” Adelaide answered. “I have felt dissatisfied all this year with Madame’s course of instruction. If it were not that I really must see my mother and have some home life, I would go to Bryn Mawr. I positively crave some good solid study. Madame’s curriculum makes me think of the course of study Aurora Leigh pursued.” Adelaide took down her favourite blue and gold volume from its companions in the “poets’ corner,”—a set of shelves,—and read with comments:

“And here you are, Tib.”

“No,” I interrupted, “I will not have you malign Professor Waite. His teaching at least has been thorough, and I feel that I have received very valuable training in my art.”

“Then I suppose that by solid work you mean that you will devote yourself to art this summer, and camp under a sketching umbrella in front of every picturesque nook you can find.”

“Art will have to wait until winter,” I replied. “I mean that I shall cook for the farm hands during haying season, and let mother go off for a visit to her sisters in Northfield, where she can attend the Moody meetings, and I shall get all the preserving done before she returns, too.”

“You are just lovely, Tib,” Milly replied, giving me a hug. “And now won’t you be surprised when you hear what I am going to do. Father says he is going to superintend my education for a while. He sent me a squib from one of the papers about the sweet girl graduate:

Father is going through practical business arithmetic with me, and says he means to teach me how to take care of money, and even fit me to take a position in his bank.”

“I pity your father,” said Winnie. “But seriously, Milly, it is the best thing you could do.”

“There is something else,” Milly said, with a painful blush, “which father says is the foundation of business, and in which I have already had one lesson, and that is honesty. He says that all the sad failures, embezzlements, and defalcations come from borrowing money that does not belong to one—using money for one purpose that was intended for another; and he means to go over a great many such cases with me to show me on what a terrible precipice I have been playing. But indeed he need not say another word, for I have been severely punished, and I think I would rather put my hand into fire than go into debt one dollar, or spend a penny for marsh-mellows that father had given me for chocolate creams.”

Winnie turned and kissed Milly. “I would trust you with millions,” she said; “but Adelaide is the only one in the Corner who knows anything about business.”

“I am sure, Winnie,” I replied, “that the way you have managed the Home finances disproves that modest assertion. What are you going to do during the summer?”

“I have no mother, you know,” Winnie said gravely, “but I am going to my father, and shall try to make his life a little less lonely for him. He writes that his eyes have been troubling him. Perhaps he can dictate to me and I can be his amanuensis. I shall take my paint-box with me, and mean to daub a little all summer. Professor Waite has no faith in my genius, but I intend to astonish that gentleman one of these days. He admits that I have an eye for colour, and the rest can be learned. If father can spare me for a week I shall accept your invitation, Adelaide, and when I appear you must give me the interior of a room to decorate. It will be startling, I tell you. I have a good deal of King’s Daughter work to do, too. You know we have not raised the money for the Manger, and the Home must have it, for they have been receiving the babies, though they have no good nursery. Now in the summer we all do more or less fancy work, and I am going to write to all the circles of King’s Daughters with whom we are in correspondence, and ask them to work for a fair, which we will hold in New York in the autumn. I have had a talk with Madame and she favors the idea. She even suggested that each circle should be invited to send a delegate who should assist in selling the articles at the tables, and very generously offered to entertain them here for three days during the continuance of the fair. You see, the school is never full at the beginning of the term, and perhaps she thinks it will be a good advertisement of her institution, to have girls from all over the county meet here, though there is really no need of imputing such mercenary motives to her. I have spoken about it at the Home to Emma Jane, and she will see that the proposition is made at the next meeting of the Board of Managers.”

“Well, you certainly have your hands full,” Milly remarked, “but I think I can help you after our tennis tournament is over. I will get the girls at the Pier to make fancy work for you if I can get any time from my arithmetic. Where will you hold the fair?”

“I haven’t planned as far as that.”

“I think the new armory at the barracks will be a splendid place,” Milly suggested. “I will get Stacey to ask Colonel Grey if we can use it, and then perhaps the cadets will be interested to do something to assist in the entertainment. They might act a play or furnish the music at least.”

“I will drum up the two circles of King’s Daughters at Scup Harbor,” I said, “and we will have a useful table, with holders and aprons and dish-wipers; pickles, honey, butter, and preserves. Why, certainly, home-made preserves. While I’m about it this summer I will make you some currant jelly and pickled peaches.”

“You had better paint something,” Adelaide said; “and you must take charge of the art department.”

“If I can come to town,” I said. “And I will start the movement before I go by asking Professor Waite to get contributions from his artist friends before he goes abroad.”

“I have been greatly touched by one thing,” said Winnie. “The interest which the Terwilligers have taken in this scheme. I happened to mention it to Polo, and the entire family have risen to the occasion. Mrs. Terwilliger sent word that she wouldn’t consider it too much if she worked for us to her dying day, considering the way her young ones had been ‘done for’ while she was sick. She has been collecting scraps of silk for a long time past to make a crazy quilt, and she intends to donate it to us. I fear me it will be a horror; but it shows her good-will all the same. Terwilliger, the trainer, says he means to collect sticks from noted places during Mr. Van Silver’s coaching tour, to be made into canes and other souvenirs for us. Polo will not have time to work for the fair, for she must sew with Miss Billings this summer. I wish she could go to the country instead.”

“I am going to invite her to Deerfield for August,” said Adelaide. “The Home children ought to be able to do something for the fair. Have you thought of them, Winnie?”

“Emma Jane will see that they manufacture a quantity of little articles in their sewing class,” Winnie replied. “They can hem towels and make bibs and bags and useful articles. I am really sorry that we cannot have the reception at the Home, for I would like to have people see those nice, fat babies.”

“They shall see them,” Milly replied. “I’ve an idea. We will devote one afternoon at the fair to a baby show. Do you remember the bicycle drill? Well, I will get Stacey to lend me his artillery tactics, and I will get up some manœuvres with baby carriages. We will call it the infantry brigade. The older children shall wheel the carriages. I will drill them without the babies at first. And then we will have them well strapped in, and then there will be a triumphal procession by twos and fours, and I’ll deploy them in line and draw them up in a hollow square, and make them ‘present arms,’ and ‘carry’ and ‘shoulder arms,’ and double quick and charge. It will be lots of fun; and one baby carriage shall have a flag fastened to it, for that baby must be the colour bearer, and we’ll have music, of course, and medals for all the babies. Then when people see what a lot of children we have, with no annex to put them in, they will rise to the occasion and contribute.”[3]

“I think something of the kind might really be arranged,” Winnie replied. “The Hornets are sure to be equally fertile in expedients. I foresee that the plan will be a great success, and it has one admirable feature—it will reunite us all in New York next winter for a week at least, and I wonder what will happen after that.”

said Adelaide softly, quoting from “Lead, Kindly Light,” her favorite hymn. There was something strangely vibrant in her tone. I knew without looking that Adelaide was on the point of tears, but I was at a loss to understand the reason.

The rest of us had had our fits of hysterical weeping at the idea of parting from one another, but Adelaide was always so superior to any weakness of that sort. What could be the matter?

Our great, last school day, so paradoxically called commencement, came at last. The exercises were in the evening, and we of the Amen Corner and many others of the girls would not leave the school until the following morning.

We received our diplomas in the school chapel, which had been beautifully decorated for the occasion. Buttertub’s father, who was a friend of Madame’s, addressed us at some length as we stood before him on the platform. I remember that Adelaide never looked more peerless, nor Milly more bewitching; and that Winnie, mischievous as ever, found a rose bug on her bouquet and could not forbear dropping it on Commodore Fitz Simmons’s bald head. The Commodore was in full uniform and had been shown to a front seat just beneath the platform. I think Winnie really meant to snap the rose bug at Stacey, but the projectile fell short of its aim. Then the sweet girl graduates in clouds of mull and chiffon, drifted into the school parlours, and there was a reception, and Adelaide and Milly were besieged by battalions of friends, but I was quite lonely and awkward, and held my bouquet and rolled diploma stiffly, until Winnie caught me about the waist and whirled me off for a little dance, for Madame had permitted this. After the dance there were refreshments in the dining-room, and we all went down, with the exception of Adelaide, who was on the reception committee, and had been stationed in the front parlour to receive any tardy guest. I met Professor Waite bringing up an ice as I went down the stairs, and Milly drew me into a corner, her eyes dancing with mischief as I entered the supper-room.

“Something is going to happen,” she said to me mysteriously. “I have given Professor Waite his opportunity, and if he doesn’t seize it and propose I shall never forgive him. I saw him moving around here, looking bored to death, and I asked him to please take an ice to Adelaide, who, I happened to mention, was all alone in the parlour. He seized the idea and the ice simultaneously. I saw resolve in his eye, and now we must keep people down here as long as we can.”

“What shall we do with Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong and Jim?” I asked. “They are all so proud of Adelaide they will be with her in a moment.”

“Winnie is in the plot and has special care of them. Jim thinks there never was quite so jolly a girl as Winnie. They are discussing the cabinet now. Mrs. Armstrong thinks that some one of us may be a somnambulist and have hidden the things in our sleep.”

“What a strategic little girl you are, Milly! What made you think of this opportunity for Professor Waite?”

“Oh! that was the way Stacey found his chance, you know. Speak of angels——How nice of you, Stacey, to bring me that salad. I am positively dying for something to eat. Wasn’t the Bishop too longsome for anything? I thought I should expire, and I was wild to get across the stage at Winnie, whose back hair was coming down. No, I shall not tell you what we were saying about you. Do get me some chicken salad. I can’t endure lobster;” and as the obedient Stacey ambled briskly away, Milly confided to me: “Do you know, Tib, Adelaide is beginning to care for Professor Waite? What makes me think so? Oh, I know the symptoms. She was packing so late last night that I nearly fell asleep, but not quite, for just as I was dozing off I saw her drop on her knees before her trunk with her face in a great white handkerchief, and while I was wondering where she ever got such a great sheet of a thing, it suddenly dawned upon me that it was the silk muffler which Professor Waite wrapped around her burned hands the night of our Halloween scrape. Suddenly it seemed to occur to her that I might be looking, and she turned to look at me, but I had my eyes shut and was snoring like an angel. Of course angels snore, Stacey Fitz Simmons. Did you ever catch an angel asleep? and if not what right have you to make fun of me? Dear me, there is the Bishop starting to go upstairs, and they don’t need him a bit—as yet.”

Milly darted across the room, planted herself squarely in the Bishop’s way, and exerted her powers of entertainment to such effect that Stacey became blindly jealous, though Buttertub had not come with his father, apparently having had quite enough of Madame’s young ladies and their entertainments.

And meantime, how was Professor Waite thriving with his wooing? Adelaide told me long afterward, so long that it was too late for any word of mine to set all right, and filled my heart with pity, not alone for the Professor, but, alas! for Adelaide also.

Professor Waite offered her the ice, which she took and thanked him very sweetly, though he had dripped it awkwardly upon her dress. Then, as Adelaide began to eat it, he inconsistently took it away from her, saying, “Don’t eat now, I have something important to say to you, and I want your entire attention.”

“Oh! certainly. What is it?” Adelaide replied, knowing exactly what he wished to say, and determined to prevent his saying it.

“Miss Adelaide, I began to say what was on my mind last Halloween——”

“Oh! yes, and pardon me for interrupting you, but you remind me that I must return your muffler, which I have kept all this time. I will get it now,” and Adelaide tried to slip by him and out of the door.

“No, you must not get it now,” the Professor exclaimed, barring her way with his extended hand in which he still held the dish of ice-cream. “I must speak to you, Miss Adelaide. I may never have another opportunity.”

“In that case do set down that ice-cream, for you are spilling it over everything.”

The Professor obeyed her.

“See,” she added pathetically, “you have nearly ruined the front of my gown——”

“But that is nothing,” he asserted, “and you must not try to divert me from my purpose by calling my attention to such a trifle. These little subterfuges are unworthy of you, Adelaide. You know what it is that I wish to say and you must hear me.”

Thus driven into a corner Adelaide looked him squarely in the eyes, and braced herself for the attack.

“You know that I love you, Adelaide?”

“Yes, I know it.”

“That I have loved you from the first moment that I saw you—desperately, hopelessly?”

“Thank you for saying that, Professor Waite; it would have been wicked in me to have given you hope. I never meant to do so. I am glad that you have not misunderstood me. And since you give me credit for not encouraging you, rather for striving to keep you from this avowal, why have you spoken? I would so gladly have spared you the pain, the humiliation of a refusal.”

“You have not allowed me to finish what I was saying. I loved you at first hopelessly for I saw that you scorned me; but lately you have not scorned me. You have pitied me; you have been very kind and considerate; your manner has wholly changed, and I believed that your feelings had changed also.”

Something in Adelaide’s honest eyes flamed up as he spoke. She could not even look a lie, though she tried hard to do so.

“I am right,” he cried triumphantly, “you have changed! You love me? Adelaide, you love me!”

His arms were almost about her, but she kept him off.

“It is impossible, Professor Waite. It can never be,” she replied solemnly.

“Never is a long day. I will not urge you, or hasten you. I will be patient and wait, for you have changed, and you will love me wholly by and by. It is our destiny. God meant us for each other. I cannot

but I can do it with my brush, and I will spend my life painting you, Adelaide. Art and Love! It is too much for mortal man to possess and live.”

“Be content with art,” Adelaide replied gently. “It is a great gift, and must console you, for I cannot be your wife.”

“Cannot? Why not?”

“I will tell you. You think you love me, but it will pass. I regard you very highly, but not above duty. The feeling which I have for you, Professor Waite, cannot be love, since it is perfectly easy for me now to give you up——”

“No,” he assented; “if that is true you do not love me.”

“Listen! The reason that it is easy for me, is not that I do not respect and admire you; not that I am not grateful to you, and do not suffer in giving you pain; not that I might not come to care still more for you, but because I know that a far tenderer heart than mine is wholly yours; that some one else, who richly deserves your affection, loves you with an utter self-abnegation of which I am incapable——”

“I know of whom you speak,” he cried impatiently, “but she is a child, and will outgrow this fancy. God knows that I am innocent, Adelaide, of having ever deluded her foolish little heart.”

“All too innocent; you might have treated her more kindly!”

“What! When I can never love her?”

“Never is a long day. You have said so. You are going away. Try to forget me and to love her, and when you return again two years hence to America——”

“When I return she will be married; she will, at least, have outgrown this silly dream.”

Adelaide shook her head. “Promise me that you will do as I ask; that you will go and ask her when you come again.”

“And if she refuses me, as she certainly will, may I come to you for the reward of my obedience?”

Again the tell-tale light flashed in Adelaide’s eyes, but she only said: “She will not refuse you.” And in the hall Milly’s voice was heard in a high key, with the best of intentions, announcing the return of the guests from the dining-room, as she replied to some banter of Stacey’s:

“Indeed, Stacey Fitz Simmons, I never change my mind—never.”

“Good-by,” said Adelaide.

Professor Waite raised the portière for her to pass. “You are very cruel,” he murmured.

“You will thank me for this some day,” she said, and the curtain of an impenetrable fate fell between them.

Milly seized my arm a few moments later. “I don’t understand it at all,” she said, “but Adelaide has certainly refused Professor Waite. I met him just now in the hall, and he glared at me like a maniac. I was positively afraid of him. I ran in to speak to Adelaide, but others had entered before me, and she only took my hand and squeezed it tight, while she talked with the Bishop. And Tib, she was as white as a sheet.”

While making allowances for Milly’s exaggerations, it seemed probable to me that her deductions were correct. Something unusual had happened, for when we went to our rooms we found that Adelaide had already retired for the night, and had taken Cynthia’s empty room, leaving a note for Milly saying that she had a headache and would rather be alone.

If we had known, Milly and I, that Adelaide had put from her a love whose dearness she only realized after its sacrifice, we might have saved her years of heroic self-abnegation, and so have frustrated God’s plan for making her a resolute, generous, and noble character.

But we did not know it, and the two girls who loved each other so dearly looked into each other’s eyes at parting, and thought that they read each other’s souls there, and yet misunderstood the reading as completely as if they had been utter strangers.

It was fortunate, shall we not say providential, that Adelaide occupied Cynthia’s room that night, and that she was so disturbed that she could not sleep? for toward morning she noticed a bright light shining through the transom over the door. Her first thought was that the thief was at work at the cabinet, and stealing cautiously from her bed she peered through the key-hole. There was no one near the cabinet, and throwing on a wrapper she softly opened the door. The room was vacant and the light which she had noticed streamed in from the window. On looking out what was her horror to see that the rear of the house was in flames. The fire had originated in the kitchen, and was making its way toward the front of the building. Her presence of mind did not desert her. She stepped to Milly’s room, wakened her gently and told her what was the matter, and then her clear voice rang out, “Fire, fire!” as she hastened to Madame’s room, sounding the telegraphic alarm in the corridor as she went. How differently people behave during a crisis like this! With the exception of Adelaide, I think we all lost our wits to a certain extent. Milly, although wakened so gently, was quite frightened out of hers. She dressed herself with extreme deliberation, heating her curling irons in the gas jet and crimping her bangs very prettily. She put on one high-buttoned boot and one Louis Seize slipper, but was particular about her gloves—fastening every button—and came to me to be helped with her graduation dress, which laced in the back.

Winnie was also greatly excited. She donned a diminutive blazer tennis jacket over her nightgown, and seeming to consider herself in full dress, rushed off to awaken Miss Noakes, carrying a small pitcher of ice-water in her hand with which to help extinguish the fire. Having forcibly entered Miss Noakes’s room, she emptied her pitcher in the face of that indignant woman. I was not much better. Possessed with the idea that I must save things, I dragged “the commissary” from under my bed, and filled it with an absurd collection of useless articles—old school books, empty pickle jars, the tidies from the chairs, all the soap from the wash-stand, a soap stone which my mother had insisted on my having as a remedy for cold feet; this I carefully wrapped in my flannel petticoat to avoid breakage. I then tossed in the globes from the gas fixtures, and finding that the cover of the trunk would not go down, sat upon it, crushing the frail glass globes to atoms. It was at this juncture that Milly came out to have her dress laced, and I was so dazed that I obeyed her. Adelaide entered a few moments later, and, spreading a blanket on the floor, opened the door leading into the studio for the first time since our initial escapade of the school year. Her intensity of feeling gave her the strength required to push the heavy chest aside, and she hastily collected all of Professor Waite’s sketches and studies, wrapped them in the blanket, and descended the turret stairs with them. Managing—how, she never knew—to burst open the door at the foot, and to carry the heavy package through the crowd which had now collected across the park to the Home of the Elder Brother, where Emma Jane received them. Winnie meantime had returned from her life-saving expedition, and assisted me in tumbling the commissary out of the window, following it with every other piece of furniture in the room. We had some difficulty with the cabinet, but finally our united efforts succeeded in toppling it over the balcony, narrowly missing crushing a fireman who was coming up the escape to order us to stop throwing out the furniture, as the fire had been extinguished.

“How provoking!” was Winnie’s first exclamation. “All this excitement for nothing!” The fire had merely burned out the interior woodwork of the kitchen; but had it not been for Adelaide’s prompt alarm, it was impossible to tell how much damage or even loss of life might have ensued. On ascertaining that there was no longer any danger, Adelaide attempted to carry back the pictures, but found herself quite unable to do so, and a procession of four of the Home boys was formed to bring them.

Adelaide begged us all to promise not to tell Professor Waite of her attempt to rescue his property, and as we were all very much mortified by our own absurd performances, we readily complied with her request.

It was late in the morning when we bethought ourselves of picking up our shattered property, which Winnie and I had tossed into the yard. Fortunately, our trunks of clothing had been so heavily packed that they had not shared this fate. We descended and viewed the heap of wreckage with dismay. Cerberus came out to aid us, and, removing the broken lounge and table, discovered the old oak cabinet an almost unrecognizable jumble of carved panels, for after it had fallen the lounge had descended upon it with the force of a catapult.

Winnie and I picked up the panels, lamenting loudly over the mischief which we had done.

“No great harm, after all,” said Adelaide consolingly. “The panels are only separated at the joints; the wood is so hard that they have not really broken,” and then she gave a little cry: “Winnie, what does this mean? Here is your essay!”

“Has Giovanni de’ Medici returned it?” I asked.

“It would seem so,” Winnie replied, in great excitement. “See, girls, here is every bit of the stolen money! The ghost has kept his word, and has returned it after his confession was read publicly.”

“Where did you find it?” I asked, utterly mystified.

“Right here, in the drawer to which we had lost the key, just under the upper part of the cabinet. You remember it has been locked since the very first day of school.”

“But is the money all there?”

“Yes; your forty-seven dollars, and the sixty from the Catacomb Party for the Home.”

“How did it ever come there?”

“That is what I am trying to find out. You know it is my mystery; and, girls, I have it! This sliding writing shelf which we pulled out to write upon is really the floor of the cabinet, on which Tib deposited her treasures. When you pull it out you rake everything upon it into the drawer below.”

“It must be,” said Adelaide, “that some one pulled out that writing shelf before each of those mysterious disappearances.” And when we came to review the circumstances, we remembered that it had been so in every instance. The lost money and essay had simply been dropped into the drawer below. All that had seemed so inexplicable was now made plain, and in our very last hour together—for, as we carried the fragments around to the turret door, we saw that the express man had come for our trunks, and noticed the Roseveldt carriage waiting behind a hansom, which had just driven up to the main entrance. On the steps Madame was parting tenderly from Miss Noakes, who was in travelling costume, and Mr. Mudge sprang from the interior of the hansom to assist her to a place beside him. Catching sight of his well-known features, Winnie impulsively waved the drawer of the cabinet and darted across the lawn.

“No wonder I could not discover the thief,” he exclaimed testily, as Winnie showed the mechanism of the sliding shelf. “The cleverest detective could not have done that when there was no thief to discover. But, my dear young lady, pray do not detain us; Miss Noakes and I have a particular engagement for this very minute at the Church of the Blessed Unity.” As he spoke he dodged an old shoe which the astute Polo projected from the studio window, and springing into the hansom drove rapidly away.

If there had been any doubt as to these indications we would have been fully enlightened on finding the announcement of their marriage in our next mail; but the truth was evident to all.

Madame listened to us with a smile. “It was kind of you, Winnie,” she said, “not to solve your mystery earlier and so take away the excuse for Mr. Mudge’s frequent calls.”

“I shall have the dear old cabinet put in order again,” Adelaide said, “and I shall keep your essay in the drawer, Winnie, for I shall always believe that you were right, and that there was a ghost.”

And so with tears and embraces, and with vows never to forget, and to meet again, and to write often, the old delightful school life and Witch Winnie’s Mystery came to an end together.