When she did so, I saw by her face that she had become a changed woman.
Walking back to the writing-table she took up the envelope and re-read the superscription which Blair had written upon it, and then for the first time her eyes fell upon the photograph of that lonely house by the crossways.
“Why!” she cried, startled, “where did you find this?”
I explained that it had dropped from the envelope, whereupon she took it up and gazed, for a long time upon it. Then, turning it over, she discovered what I had not noticed, namely, written faintly in pencil and half effaced were the words, “Owston crossroads, 9 miles beyond Doncaster on the Selby Road.—B.B.”
“Do you know what this is?”
“No, I haven’t the least idea,” I answered. “It must be something of which your father was very careful. It seems to be well worn, too, as though carried in somebody’s pocket.”
“Well,” she said, “I will tell you. I had no idea that he still preserved it, but I suppose he kept it as a souvenir of those weary journeys of long ago. This photograph,” she added, holding it still in her hand, “is the picture of the spot for which he searched every turnpike in England. He had the photograph but nothing else to guide him to the spot, and we were therefore compelled to tramp all the main roads up and down the country in an attempt to identify it. Not until nearly a year after you and Mr Seton had so kindly placed me at school at Bournemouth did my father, still on his lonely tramp, succeed in discovering it after a search lasting over three years. He identified it one summer evening as the crossways at Owston, and he found living in that house the person of whom he had been all those weary months in search.”
“Curious,” I said. “Tell me more about it.”
“There is nothing else to tell, except that, by identifying the house, he obtained the key to the secret—at least, that is what I always understood from him,” she said. “Ah, I recollect all those long wearying walks when I was a girl, how we trudged on over those long, white, endless roads, in sunshine and in rain, envying people in carriages and carts, and men and women on bicycles, and yet my courage always supported by my father’s declaration that great fortune must be ours some day. He carried this photograph with him always, and almost at each crossroad he would take it out, examine the landscape and compare it, not knowing, of course, but that the old toll-house might have been pulled down since the taking of the picture.”
“Did he never tell you the reason why he wished to visit that house.”