Jane passed her on the stairs, and was back again in a moment with the medicine, a spoon, and a glass of water. With her arm around the elder woman she held her until the color returned to her cheeks.
“How foolish,” said Mrs. Follette at last, sitting up. “I almost fainted. I was afraid of falling down the stairs.”
“Let me help you to your room,” Jane said, “and you can lie on the couch—and be quiet——”
“I don’t want to be quiet, but I’ll lie on the couch—if you’ll sit there and talk to me.”
So with Jane supporting her, Mrs. Follette went up the rest of the flight, and across the hall—and was made comfortable on a couch at the foot of her bed.
Jane loved the up-stairs rooms at Castle Manor. Especially in summer. Mrs. Follette followed the southern fashion of taking up winter rugs and winter curtains and substituting sheer muslins and leaving a delightful bareness of waxed floor.
“Perhaps I can tell you where to find the miniature,” Mrs. Follette said, as Jane fanned her; “it is in Evans’ desk set back under the row of pigeon-holes. You can’t miss it, and I want to see it.”
Jane crossed the hall to Evans’ room. It faced south and was big and square. It had the same studied bareness that made the rest of the house beautiful. There was a mahogany bed and dresser, many books, deep window-seats with faded velvet cushions.
Evans’ desk was in an alcove by the east window which overlooked Sherwood. It was a mahogany desk of the secretary type, and there was nothing about it to drain the color from Jane’s cheeks, to send her hand to her heart.
Above the desk, however, where his eyes could rest upon it whenever he raised them from his writing, was an old lantern! Jane knew it at once. It was an ancient ship’s lantern that she and Baldy had used through all the years, a heritage from some sea-going ancestor. It was the lantern she had carried that night she had found Evans in the fog!