Today we were waiting for Michael to come. He’d formed the habit of stopping on his way down from the farm. Sometimes it was his advice Aunt Cal wanted about grading the lawn or the laying out of paths or flowerbeds. Sometimes he was needed to bolster up the flagging energies of our man of all work. For Gopher, though freed of the charge hanging over him through the intervention of Mr. Templeton and Captain Trout, did not take kindly to the job with which Aunt Cal had provided him. “Tillin’ the soil” he stated was out of his line as, I strongly suspected, was labor of any sort. But with Aunt Cal’s sharp eyes never long withdrawn and the knowledge that but for her he would now be sojourning in a far less pleasant place, he kept grimly at it. I used to feel sorry for him sometimes as I saw him stop to wipe his seamed, weatherbeaten face and gaze sadly down the road. And some fine morning, I felt sure, when the wind blew from the sea, Aunt Cal would come out to give directions for the day’s work and he just wouldn’t be there.
“Well, here’s your letter at last!” Eve came up the newly graveled path. She’d been to town with Miss Rose to do some errands and get the mail. My heart gave the little leap that it always does at the sight of the thin paper envelope, bearing the Chinese stamp. Aunt Cal came out to listen as I read it aloud:
“My dear daughter:
Your account of your adventures at Craven House gave us quite as much of a thrill as they must have given you. I am immensely pleased that Calliope has decided to move into the old place. I remember it well. Your mother and I stopped there with you when you were three years old, and your curious recollection of the cupboard by the fireplace undoubtedly dates from that visit.
Your mother had come down for a last visit with your grandmother Poole before we sailed for the East. It was just after your Aunt Cal had married and gone West to live. We stopped for a call on Captain Judd Craven, a fine old man of the best seafaring traditions. We were grieved to get the news of his death the following year.
I recall the big front parlor and the jar of some sort of incense on the cabinet. Very likely you got a good whiff of it, one that your sensitive nerves of smell have never forgotten. The associative power of odors is well known, and so the cupboard and particularly the china duck which you say it contained became associated in your mind with the strange new smell. Thus when you smelled it again, even after the lapse of thirteen years, the particular brain cells into which the memory had been packed away released the recollection. I have heard of many similar instances, but few which have led to so dramatic a development as in your case.”
“Well, well, that does beat all!” exclaimed Aunt Cal. “And to think of your being only three at the time!”
“I think it’s perfectly weird!” said Eve.
“Not weird at all,” I said. “Just perfectly normal and scientific as Dad explains. And I must say I’m glad to have it established that I’m not subject to trances or—what was it—cataleptic fits as Hamish so darkly hinted!”
“There’s Michael, and in a clean shirt too, if my eyes do not deceive me! Let’s go tell him about it, he’ll be frightfully interested.”