“It is mine! I know it is mine!” she cried. “You really ought not to claim everything that is sent to the house, Penelope—as if nobody had any friends or presents but you!” and she rushed upstairs like a whirlwind.
I examined the outside wrapper, lying on the floor, and found, to my chagrin, that it did bear Miss Monroe’s name, somewhat blotted by the rain; but if the box were addressed to her, why was the silver thing inscribed to Miss Dalziel? Well, Francesca would explain the mystery within the hour, unless she had become a changed being.
Fifteen minutes passed. Salemina was making Jubilee sandwiches at Pettybaw House, Miss Dalziel was asleep in her room, I was being devoured slowly by curiosity, when Francesca came down without a word, walked out of the front door, went up to the main street, and entered the village post-office without so much as a backward glance. She was a changed being, then! I might as well be living in a Gaboriau novel, I thought, and went up into my little painting and writing room to address a programme of the Pettybaw celebration to Lady Baird, watch for the glimpse of Willie coming down the loaning, and see if I could discover where Francesca went from the post-office.
Sitting down by my desk, I could find neither my wax nor my silver candlestick, my scissors nor my ball of twine. Plainly Francesca had been on one of her borrowing tours; and she had left an additional trace of herself—if one were needed—in a book of old Scottish ballads, open at ‘Hynde Horn.’ I glanced at it idly while I was waiting for her to return. I was not familiar with the opening verses, and these were the first lines that met my eye:—
‘Oh, he gave to his love a silver wand,
Her sceptre of rule over fair Scotland;
With three singing laverocks set thereon
For to mind her of him when he was gone.
And his love gave to him a gay gold ring
With three shining diamonds set therein;
Oh, his love gave to him this gay gold ring,
Of virtue and value above all thing.’
A light dawned upon me! The silver mystery, then, was intended for a wand—and a very pretty way of making love to an American girl, too, to call it a ‘sceptre of rule over fair Scotland’; and the three birds were three singing laverocks ‘to mind her of him when he was gone’!
But the real Hynde Horn in the dear old ballad had a truelove who was not captious and capricious and cold like Francesca. His love gave him a gay gold ring—
‘Of virtue and value above all thing.’
Yet stay: behind the ballad book flung heedlessly on my desk was—what should it be but the little morocco case, empty now, in which our Francesca keeps her dead mother’s engagement ring—the mother who died when she was a wee child. Truly a very pretty modern ballad to be sung in these unromantic, degenerate days!
Francesca came in at the door behind me, saw her secret reflected in my tell-tale face, saw the sympathetic moisture in my eyes, and, flinging herself into my willing arms, burst into tears.