"Yes," I said, eagerly; "and oh, Ronald, here is some guitar music in it! Play it to me at once; I am impatient to hear this tune."
He ran his eye over the notes, tuned the instrument, and yielded to my request at once. I was not deceived; the first chords, sweet and soft and gay, convinced me that we had discovered our mysterious melody at last.
"So this is really our haunting air!" said Ronald, when he had played it to the end. "And it was a memory of my childhood, after all. I must have heard my mother sing it."
I was silent for a minute, waiting for what he would say next. He read the title of the little song once or twice before it seemed to bring any light into his mind.
"Hope guards the jewels!" he cried at last. "Louie, those words are written in Spanish inside the guitar. It surely can't be possible, little woman, that we have got the lost guitar here!"
"It is the fact, Ronald," I said, quietly. "Just compare the writing in the album with the writing inside the guitar. And now, look at this page in the book. The card on which the music is written is merely kept in its place by means of four slits cut in the leaf; and the four corners of the card are slipped into the slits. Shall we draw it out and examine it?"
The hint was, enough for my husband. In a second or two, the volume lay upon the table, and Ronald stood by the window with the card in his hand. On the back of it there were a few words in Spanish.
"Remove the parchment label from the inside of the guitar, and read what is written on the reverse side of the parchment."
It was plain that had Estella lived she would have understood the hidden meaning in the song, even without this direction, and would have searched the guitar to find out the last wishes of her sister. The air was one which they had constantly sung together in their early days, and it had, perhaps, certain associations for them which were lost to us. That poor Inez, always unlike other women, and partly crazed by sorrow, should have used her beloved guitar as the depository of her secret, would not have appeared so strange to Estella as it seemed to Ronald and myself.
It was the work of a few moments to detach the label, which was only pasted at the corners; and, when this had been carefully done, the back of the label was found to be covered with fine and delicate writing in English.