“Who is this?” asked Mary, pointing to another old-fashioned photograph.
The invalid smiled as if the sight of this new face brought up pleasant memories, and the young man in the picture smiled back at her, a kindly, merry smile. It was not a tinted picture and they could only tell that he had dark hair and eyes and a strong, rugged face.
“That,” she said sadly, “was an old and—and dear friend—Ignatius Donahue.”
Virginia hurried into the room at this moment and looked a quick warning at the girls. In another instant they would have exclaimed: “Ignatius Donahue? We travelled down in his private car!”
“Good-bye, Mamma, dearest,” Virginia said, taking the plaque and photographs gently but firmly away from her mother and locking them in the cabinet. “Mammy will take good care of you and I shall be back to-morrow morning. If we are to get to the hotel by lunch time, we had better be hurrying on. It’s a quarter to one now. You won’t forget your drops at half-past, will you, dear? And your tonic to-night? See, I’ll put them here to remind you. Good-bye,” and she kissed her mother twice and hurried the girls out of the room quickly.
The old colored woman was waiting in the hall, probably to go on duty, and Billie heard Virginia whisper as she passed:
“She’s been looking at those pictures again, Mammy.”
Only one thing more happened before they left that mysterious house. Billie, who was the last in the line of young girls to file down the staircase, heard a door creak in the hall and looked back. There, standing in the doorway of one of the other rooms stood a tall, well-built man. A long white bandage was wrapped around and around his head. But it did not hide his rugged face, and at that moment, his lips, for some unknown reason, were curled into a kindly, merry smile. Perhaps it was Uncle Peter who provoked the smile, for he appeared just then with Virginia’s battered old suit case, standing very erect and dignified in his old blue cloth swallowtail with its brass buttons, like the fine old-time servant he was.
On the way back to the hotel, they told Virginia the story of their adventures in the woods.
“Do you think it could have been Dick?” they asked, when they reached the mocking bird part of the history.