Gerda smiled.
"Father had often told me about the well, and the exact way to perform St. Perran's ceremony. He used to try it with Lillie when he was a little boy. He said half the secret was to unstop the channel above the spring. My wish was that I might clear his name, so you see it came true, though at the time it seemed as unlikely as flying in an aeroplane to America."
"You put a message in a bottle and threw it into the sea for your father," said Deirdre. "You didn't know Dulcie and I fished it out?"
"Oh! Did you?" said Gerda reproachfully. "Then that was the letter he never received?"
Gerda's discovery in Abel Galsworthy of the missing witness for whom such long search had been made was certainly a very fortunate circumstance for that worthy. Instead of being handed over to the police, and prosecuted for trespassing and pilfering, he found himself provided with new clothes, comfortably lodged in the village, and given a promise of work when his important part in the law proceedings should be over. At present he was the hero of the hour, for on his word alone hung Mr. Trevellyan's honour. As the other witness and the lawyer were both dead, his oath to his signature would be sufficient to prove the genuineness of the codicil. There were, of course, elaborate legal proceedings to be taken. Mr. Trevellyan appealed for a reversal of the judgment in the former trial, and the case would have to wait its turn before it could come before the court. As the warrant for his arrest was still technically in force, he was obliged to continue living on the yacht until his innocence had been officially recognized—a state of affairs that greatly roused Gerda's indignation, though Miss Birks preached patience.
"I wanted Father and Mother to come to the prize-giving," she lamented.
"These legal difficulties cannot be rolled away in a few days," said Miss Birks. "Let us be thankful that we can count upon success later on."
Now that Gerda no longer needed to hide a tragic secret, her whole behaviour at the Dower House had altered, and her schoolfellows hardly recognized in the merry, genial, sociable companion, which she now proved, the silent recluse who had given her confidence to nobody. In this fresh attitude she was highly popular; the romance of her story appealed to the girls, and they were anxious to make up to her for having misjudged her. Also they greatly appreciated her newly-discovered capacity for fun and humour.
"Gerda never made one solitary joke before, and now she keeps us laughing all day," said Betty Scott.
"How could she laugh when she was carrying that terrible burden all the time?" commented Jessie Macpherson. "Poor child! No wonder she's different now the shadow's removed from her life."