The box was lined with cedar, and as the cover was raised a faint, sweet odour of cedar mingled with otto of roses came with a message from the past. Through the dim haze of long years that scent recalled to Griselda a room, where a tall dark man had sat by the embers of a fire, the box before him, and some words which the fragrance mysteriously seemed to bring back.
"It was her wish, and the child must go." The child! What child?—and whither did she go? It was herself—it must have been herself—the man meant.
Then it was all haze again. The light that had penetrated the mists of the past, and brought the scene before her, was obscured once more.
That man must have been her father; but she had no memories of him either before or after that day, which had risen like a phantom before her, called up by the faint sweet scent of the old jewel-box.
The necklets were very fair to look at—one of pearls, with a diamond clasp, and initials on the gold at the back, which were her dead mother's. No, she could not sell that; but there were heavy ear-drops of solid gold, and a set of gold buttons—these would surely fetch something. The amethyst necklace, with its lovely purple hue, had never belonged to her mother; and she put it, with the gold buttons and ear-rings, into a small leather box, and was pressing down one of the compartments, when a drawer flew open she had never noticed before. In the drawer were some diamond ornaments and rings; a piece of yellow paper was fastened to one of the rings:
"Deserted by the husband I trusted, I, Phyllis Mainwaring, leave to my only child, Griselda, these diamonds. I place them out of sight, safe from dishonest hands. When I left him to get bread he knew nothing of them, or he would have sold them. They are my poor darling's only inheritance, and I leave them secure that one day she will find them. Let her take with them her unhappy mother's blessing."
This was indeed a discovery. Griselda had always remembered that this box had stood in her room at Longueville House. She remembered her uncle bidding her bring it to him, and that he placed in it the trinkets left to her by her grandmother, but never had anyone suspected the existence of the diamonds. No one knew, that when the man whom she had married was running through her little fortune, the unhappy wife had, in her despair, converted a few hundreds into diamonds, and hidden them away from all eyes in that old jewel-box.
Griselda's eyes filled with tears. She pressed the bit of paper to her lips, and, wholly unconscious of the worth of those precious stones, she closed the drawer again upon that unexpected discovery, and, putting the small box safely in the drawer of the bureau, she took her violin from its case, and tried to wake from it the music which lay hidden in it. As she played—imperfectly enough, yet with the ear of a musician—her spirit was soothed and comforted; and these verses, written in a thin, pointed hand, were dropped into Lady Miller's vase that evening with no name or cypher affixed, and the mystery of the author was not solved:
WAITING.
"Loveliest strains are lying,
Waiting to awake,
Till a master's hand
Shall sweetest music make.