"No, surely not, for they would be yellow with age," she continued, as she began to examine them.
"Ah!" with a start, and growing pale, "here is a letter addressed to me—For Mona—and in Uncle Walter's handwriting! He must have known about the secret of this mirror, and put these letters here with some special object in view. What can it mean?"
She grew dizzy—almost faint with the excitement of her discovery, and the things dropped from her nerveless fingers upon her lap.
"There is some secret here!" she whispered, as she gazed down at them, an expression of dread in her startled eyes. "Perhaps it is the secret which I have so long wanted to know! Can it be that the mystery of my mother's sad fate is about to be solved—that Uncle Walter had not the courage to tell me all, that never-to-be-forgotten morning, but wrote it out and hid it here for me to find later? Ah!" and she lifted her head as if suddenly recalling something, "this was what he tried to make me understand the day he died! He sent me for the mirror, not to remind me to keep it always, as I thought at the time, but to explain the secret of it, so that I could find what he had hidden here. Oh, how he suffered because he could not show me! Why could I not have understood?" and her tears fell thick and fast, as she thus lived over again that painful experience.
She soon brushed them away, however, and lifting the mirror, examined it carefully.
She found that the tiny drawer would shove smoothly in and out, and she pushed it almost in, but took care not to quite close it.
"There must be a spring somewhere to hold it in place," she murmured, regarding it curiously. "Ah! now I feel it! But how is it operated? How can the drawer be opened again if I shut it entirely?"
She looked the mirror over most carefully, both on the back and front, but at first could detect nothing. But at length, as she still continued to work the drawer in and out, she noticed that the central pearl and gold point at the top of the frame moved slightly as she pressed the drawer close upon the spring, and she believed that she had discovered the Secret of the Royal Mirror.
With a resolute air she shut it entirely and heard the click of the spring as it shot into its socket. Her reason told her that pressure applied to that central point of pearl and gold would at once release the drawer again.
She tried it, and instantly it dropped out upon her lap.