"There are whole barrels of old papers under the eaves in the garret,"

said Aunt Sarah; "I have always meant to have them burned up; I dare say this came out of one of them, in some way;" and she resumed her habitual expression of nonchalance.

"Perhaps so," said Uncle Jo, folding up the paper and putting it in his pocket. "I will look, after breakfast."

She glanced up, again surprised, and said, "Why? is it of any importance?"

"Oh, no, no," said he hastily, with a shade of embarra.s.sment in his voice, "it is only an old letter, but I thought there might be more from the same person."

"Who was it?" said Aunt Sarah, languidly.

"I don't know; only the first name is signed," said he evasively; and the placid lady asked no more. The children were busy with Fido, and breakfast went on, but I watched my uncle's face. I had never seen it look just as it looked then. What could that old yellow letter have been? My magnetic sympathy with my uncle told me that he was deeply moved.

At dinner-time my uncle was late, and Aunt Sarah said, with a little less than her usual dignity, "I never did see such a man as Mr. Norton, when he takes a notion in his head. He's been all the morning rummaging in clouds of dust in the garret, to find more of those old letters."

"Who wrote it, Auntie?" said I.

"Heaven knows," said she; "some woman or other, fifty years ago. He says her name was Esther."

"Did you read it?" I asked tremblingly. Already I felt a shrinking sense of regard for the unknown Esther.

Aunt Sarah looked at me with almost amused surprise. "Read it, child? no, indeed! What do I care what that poor soul wrote half a century ago. But your uncle's half out of his head about her, and he's had all the servants up questioning them back and forth till they are nearly as mad as he is.

Cook says she has found several of them on the cellar stairs in the last few weeks; but she saw they were so old she threw them into the fire, and never once looked at them; and when she said that, your uncle just groaned. I never did see such a man as he is when he gets a notion in his head,"--she repeated, hopelessly.

My uncle came in flushed and tired. Nothing was said about the letters till, just as dinner was over, he said suddenly:--

"Robert, if you find any more of these old papers anywhere, bring them to me at once. And give orders to all the servants that no piece of old paper with writing on it is to be destroyed without my seeing it."

"Yes, sir," said Robert, without changing a muscle of his face, but I saw that he too was of Mrs. Norton's opinion as to his master's oddity when he once got a notion in his head.

"Who was the lady, papa?" said little Agnes. "Did you know her?"

"My dear, the letter is as old as papa is himself," said he. "I think the lady died when papa was a little baby."

"Then what makes you care so much, papa?" persisted Agnes.

"I can't tell you, little one," said he, kissing her, and tossing her up in the air; but he looked at me.

In the early twilight that afternoon I found my uncle lying with closed eyes on the lounge in the library. He was very tired by his long forenoon's work in the garret. I sat down on the floor and stroked his dear old white hair.

"Pet," he said, without opening his eyes, "that letter had the whole soul of a woman in it."

"I thought so, dear," said I, "by your face."

After a long interval he said: "I could not find a word more of her writing; I might have known I should not;" and again, after a still longer silence, "Would you like to read it, Nell?"

"I am not sure, Uncle Jo," I said. "It seems hardly right. I think she would not so much mind your having it, because you are a man; but another woman! no, uncle dear, I think the letter belongs to you."

"Oh, you true woman-hearted darling," he said, kissing me; "but some day I think I shall want you to read it with me. She would not mind your reading it, if she knew you as I do."

Just then Aunt Sarah came into the room, and we said no more.

Several days pa.s.sed by, and the mysterious letter was forgotten by everybody except my uncle and me.

One bitterly cold night we were sitting around a blazing coal fire in the library. It was very late. Aunt Sarah was asleep in her chair; my uncle was reading. Suddenly the door opened and Robert came in, bringing a letter on his little silver tray: it was past eleven o'clock; the evening mail had been brought in long before.

"Why, what is that, Robert?" said Uncle Jo, starting up a little alarmed.

"One of them old letters, sir," replied Robert; "I just got it on the cellar stairs, sir."

My uncle took the letter hastily. Robert still stood as if he had more to say; and his honest, blank face looked stupefied with perplexity.

"If you please, sir," he began, "it's the queerest thing ever I saw. That letter's been put on them stairs, sir, within the last five minutes."

"Why, Robert, what do you mean?" said my uncle, thoroughly excited.

"Oh dear," groaned Aunt Sarah, creeping out of her nap and chair, "if you are going into another catechism about those old letters, I am going to bed;" and she left the room, not staying long enough to understand that this was a new mystery, and not a vain rediscussing of the old one.

It seemed that Robert had been down cellar to see that the furnace fire was in order for the night. As soon as he reached the top of the stairs, in coming up, he remembered that he had not turned the outside damper properly, and went back to do it.

"I wasn't gone three minutes, sir, and when I came back there lay the letter, right side up, square in the middle of the stairs; and I'd take my Bible oath, sir, as 'twan't there when I went down."

"Who was in the hall when you went down, Robert?" said my uncle sternly.

"n.o.body, sir. Every servant in the house had gone to bed, except Jane" (my aunt's maid), "and she was going up the stairs over my head, sir, when I first went down into the cellar. I know she was, sir, for she called through the stairs to me, and she says, 'Master'll hear you, Robert.' You see, sir, Jane and me didn't know as it was so late, and we was frightened when we heard the clock strike half-past eleven."

"That will do, Robert," said Uncle Jo. "You can go," and Robert disappeared, relieved but puzzled. There seemed no possible explanation of the appearance of the letter there and then, except that hands had placed it there during the brief interval of Robert's being in the cellar. There were no human hands in the house which could have done it. Was a restless ghost wandering there, bent on betraying poor Esther's secrets to strangers? What did it, what could it mean?

"Will you read this one with me, Nell?" said my uncle, turning it over reverently and opening it.

"No," I said, "but I will watch you read it;" and I sat down on the floor at his feet.

The letter was very short; he read it twice without speaking; and then said, in an unsteady voice: "This is an earlier letter than the other, I think. This is a joyous one; poor Esther! I believe I know her whole story. But the mystery is inexplicable! I would take down these walls if I thought I could get at the secret."

Long past midnight we sat and talked it all over; and racked our brains in vain to invent any theory to account for the appearance of the letters on that cellar stairway. My uncle's tender interest in the poor dead Esther was fast being overshadowed by the perplexing mystery.

A few days after this, Mary the cook found another of the letters when she first went down-stairs in the morning, and Robert placed it by my uncle's plate, with the rest of his mail. It was the strangest one of all, for there was not a word of writing in it that could be read. It was a foreign letter; some lines of the faded old postmarks were still visible on the back. The first page looked as if it had been written over with some sort of sympathetic ink; but not a word could be deciphered. Folded in a small piece of the thinnest of paper was a mouldy and crumbling flower, of a dull-brown color; on the paper was written,--"Pomegranate blossom, from Jaffa," and a few lines of poetry, of which we could make out only here and there a word.

Even Aunt Sarah was thoroughly aroused and excited now. Robert had been in the cellar very late on the previous night, and was sure that at that time no papers were on the stairs.

"I never go down them stairs, sir," said Robert, "without looking--and listening too," he added under his breath, with a furtive look back at the cook, who was standing in the second doorway of the butler's pantry. The truth was, Robert had been afraid of the cellar ever since the finding of the second letter: and all the servants shared his uneasiness.

Between eleven at night and seven the next morning, this mute ghostly waif from Palestine, with the half-century old dust of a pomegranate flower in its keeping, had come up that dark stairway. It appeared now that the letters were always found on the fourth stair from the top. This fact had not before been elicited, but there seemed little doubt about it. Even little Princess said,--

"Yes, papa, I am sure that the one I found was on that stair; for I now remember Fido came up with only just one or two bounds to the top, as soon as he saw me."

We were very sober. The little children chattered on; it meant nothing to them, this breath from such a far past. But to hearts old enough to comprehend, there was something infinitely sad and suggestive in it. I already felt, though I had not read one word of her writing, that I loved the woman called Esther; as for my uncle, his very face was becoming changed by the thought of her, and the mystery about the appearance of the letters. He began to be annoyed also; for the servants were growing suspicious, and unwilling to go into the cellar. Mary the cook declared that on the morning when she found this last letter, something white brushed by her at the foot of the stairs; and Robert said that he had for a long time heard strange sounds from that staircase late at night.

Just after this, my aunt went away for a visit; and several days pa.s.sed without any further discoveries on the stairs. My uncle and I spent long hours in talking over the mystery, and he urged me to read, or to let him read to me, the two letters he had.