“I’ll wager no silversmith could have done it better with the tool I had, the fine blade of my penknife,” boasted Stack, peering down at the minute, intertwined letters under the sunburst; “you see they were easy letters to weave into a monogram: J. D. H.: Jessica Dee Holley!”
“Dee! Dee! Is your middle name Dee?” The irate lawyer’s expression changed as if a flash of lightning from the electric bulbs overhead struck him. “Dee!” he reiterated. “It’s not a common surname; I have, as yet, only got upon the track of a few families of that name. And I can’t—I can’t go about asking every one I meet what his or her middle name is, if it happens to begin with D.” He looked appealingly at Jessica, shifting the old coin upon his wrinkled palm.
“No, of course not.” Morning-Glory did not know whether to laugh or hide; she thought he was slightly deranged and edged a little closer to Miles.
“I’m going on to Newburyport on the Merrimac River in a day or two, to see whether I can, in person, get upon the trail of any Dees whose ancestors lived there,” went on the man who was on a “side-stepping” quest.
“Well! you needn’t go any farther,” proclaimed Stack excitedly, his Boy Scout’s trained detective-instinct leading him to believe that there was “something in the wind.” “Do some pumping—I mean questioning—here first! Miss Holley’s middle name is Dee and she has just told me that her great-grandfather—on her mother’s side, I suppose—came from Newburyport. He was a sea-captain.”
“A sea-captain!” More lightning struck the lawyer, so it seemed; he made a few prancing, forward steps. “Was he drowned?”
“Yes, in the year 1840, so Mother told me.” There was the germ of a sob in Jessica’s answer; she did not take kindly to abrupt questioning about this heroic, handsome ancestor whose memory she idolized.
“What was his name, his full name—may I ask?”
“Captain Josiah Flint Dee, sir.” The great-grandchild spoke the name proudly, although she was beginning to tremble and shiver, she didn’t know why; was it possible that the ancestor whose dimpled chin, blue eyes and live smile—preserved on ivory all these years—had been the living companion of her loneliest, sorrowfulest hours, was really—really—coming alive, at last, in some deed of his, to bless her?
Not for an instant was she so disloyal to the gallant shoulders and the fine head in the old miniature as to imagine that any deed of his could shame her.