Just now a young girl stood in the large unfurnished room that served the house as an attic—and she held a folded paper in her hand.
She had drawn out of its dusty corner a small and quaintly shaped horsehide trunk upon which, in spots, the hair still adhered. The storage-room that could furnish forth its mate must be one whose proprietors held inviolate relics of long-gone days, for its like has not been made since the life of America was slenderly strung along the Atlantic seaboard and the bison ranged about his salt licks east of the Mississippi.
Into the lock the girl fitted a cumbersome brass key and then for a long minute she stood there breathing the forenoon air that eddied in currents of fresh warmth. The June sunlight came, too, in a golden flood and the soft radiance of it played upon her hair and cheeks.
Outside, almost brushing the eaves with the plumes of its farthest flung branches, stood a gigantic walnut tree whose fresh leafage filtered a mottling of sunlight upon the age-tempered walls.
The girl herself, in her red dress, was slim and colourful enough and dewy-fresh enough to endure the searching illumination of the June morning.
Dark hair crowned the head that she threw back to gaze upward into the venerable branches of the tree, and her eyes were as dark as her hair and as deep as a soft night sky.
Over beetling summits and sunlit valley the girl's glance went lightly and contentedly, but when it came back to nearer distances it dwelt with an absorbed tenderness on the gnarled old veteran of storm-tested generations that stood there before the house: the walnut which the people of her family had always called the "roof tree" because some fanciful grandmother had so named it in the long ago.
"I reckon ye're safe now, old roof tree," she murmured, for to her the tree was human enough to deserve actual address, and as she spoke she sighed as one sighs who is relieved of an old anxiety.
Then, recalled to the mission that had brought her here, she thought of the folded paper that she held in her hand.
So she drew the ancient trunk nearer to the window and lifted its cover.