"You are wonderful guessers," said the doctor. "He lived in a palace."

"I knew it," cried Mary.

"Would it disappoint you very much if I were to tell you that the gentleman without a memory who lived in a palace was not a prince, nor a duke, nor a baron, but at one time a clergyman?"

"Oh!" they exclaimed in varying tones of surprise and disappointment.

"Then how the palace?" asked Maggie Hook.

"The Rev. Archibald Jones, a highly educated English gentleman of no means to speak of, was tutor in a n.o.ble family in Germany."

"But his wife? She was a princess?" cried Mary, almost weeping.

"Every woman is a princess, my dear young lady," replied the gallant doctor.

"But a real one, Doctor? One who lived in a palace?"

"She lived in the palace, yes. She was attached to the household as English governess. The tutor and the governess met, as well they might even in a grand castle, and being in the same boat as regards teaching and birth, they fell in love. The lady was very beautiful, I understand."

"And then?" demanded the chorus.

"Then they came to America where the field was larger even than in a palace with the _n.o.blesse_. The young wife fell sick and the young husband, having saved a bit of money, brought her up into the mountains.

The night Phoebe was born he tried to take a short cut down the mountainside to get a doctor who was stopping at a hotel now in ruins----"

Percy bowed his head.

"I recognize the spot," he said.

"And the young tutor husband not of the n.o.bility fell and hit his head against a rock. He was brought back insensible by an old Indian grandfather of Mrs. Lupo. The beautiful young wife only lived a few days, and when the father was better and the baby stronger the Indian took them and their belongings across the valley to Indian Head, where they have lived ever since."

"Poor things," exclaimed Miss Campbell. "What a pitiful, sad story!"

"And the wife's name was Phoebe Jones?" asked Billie.

"Wrong again," replied the doctor. "Would you have a Jones marry a Jones?"

"Then who, pray, was Miss Phoebe Jones?"

"Aunt of the Rev. Archibald. For some reason he remembered the name and I suppose gave it to the child."

"Then who was the German gentleman who recognized Phoebe?"

"Now you are getting down to real romance," replied the doctor.

"He was the young n.o.ble for whom the Rev. Archibald acted as tutor."

Here the doctor spoke slowly and impressively. "He loved the English governess and when she married the poor tutor, his n.o.ble heart was broken and never has been mended."

"And he never married another?" piped up Mary's small voice.

"Oh yes, my dear. The n.o.bility always marries. Singleness is against the rules. He married and has a family of six."

"And is that the end of the story?" asked Billie.

"No, there is a sequel. It seems that when the Rev. and Mrs. Archibald Jones disappeared from the stage of life without explanation only one person, after a decade or more, still clung to the belief that they were not dead. None other than Miss Phoebe Jones herself, spinster, living in Surrey, England. She recently died leaving her property to her nephew, his wife or possible heirs. It seems that the gentlemen who just now dropped me at your door----"

"The disappointed lover?"

"Yes. The broken-hearted n.o.ble with a wife and six children, knew about this will because the lawyers in trying to trace Mr. Jones and his wife had got into communication with him."

"And so they won't be poor," said Nancy. "I'm glad of that. Phoebe looked beautiful in good clothes."

Everybody laughed, and then the doctor remarked:

"And so the story has a plain ending, after all. Phoebe is not a princess and you are all disappointed."

"No, no, no," they protested, but the doctor knew better.

CHAPTER XXI.

COMRADES OF THE ROAD.

Already the scarlet sumac lit the road with its flaming torch, and here and there on the mountainside a flash of scarlet like a redbird's wing appeared among the ma.s.ses of foliage. Autumn was at hand, the autumn of the Adirondacks, when the evening air is nipped with the hint of frosts to come and the sky is a deeper blue than ever it is at mid-summer.

Summer comrades of the road may not linger in the hills at this enchanting season. There is work to be done in the valleys where the busy people live. In a few days now the shutters of log cabin camps will be closed and traveling vans will be sent to winter quarters.

The boys and girls who have lingered around the campfire, singing songs and telling stories under the great harvest moon, all comrades of the road, must turn their thoughts to soberer things than roasting apples and school day reminiscences. The grown people, too, stretched out in their steamer chairs, have been idling away the hours. Vaguely, as in a mist, a great surgeon recalls that there is a hospital somewhere he has been neglecting for weeks. An engineer is thinking of his tunnel only just started through the heart of a mountain. A little old spinster, fair and fresh as a rose, recalls with a start that for many weeks she has been sleeping under the stars and eating strange food on a bare deal table; and down in the valley her beautiful old home, filled with memories of her girlhood, is waiting to shelter her.

Near the spinster sits a tall man with a delicate, nervous face. He sits with folded arms, his eyes fixed on the back wall of mountains across the valley. He is thinking not of the future of the little home in Surrey that awaits him, but of the twenty black years behind him, as blank and empty as the years of a prisoner spent in solitary confinement. Sometimes, with a curious, startled gaze, he turns his eyes toward his daughter, seated in the circle with the young people.

While we have been taking this leisurely view of our friends, Alberdina has approached, smiling broadly over a great tray of cakes and ginger ale. Mrs. Lupo is hovering in the background.

"It was that skirt of the young lady's that brought me really back to my senses," Mrs. Lupo had confessed to Miss Campbell. "I thought the young lady had sunk in the mire. The misery that come to me then made me see things different; that and the prayer you taught me. Lupo, he's workin'

now in the valley and when the camp is broke up, I guess we'll forgive and forgit."

Miss Campbell, glancing at Mrs. Lupo now in the background, wondered if that awful memory of the carving knife was not a dream.

"Papa," Billie called from her place near the campfire, "you mustn't forget to send pounds and pounds of really good coffee to old Granny, the herb gatherer, enough to last her all winter."

"I'll make a note of it, daughter. Are there any other old parties you wish to pension off with coffee or tea this winter?"

"No, papa. But I'd like to keep old Granny in coffee for the rest of her life because she loves it so."

"Ladies and gentlemen," called Percy, rising and flourishing an apple on the end of a long stick, "I made a discovery this morning through a letter from a friend, and I've been saving it until this moment to spring it on the Motor Maids and company."

"About whom is this discovery?" asked Richard uneasily, raising his eyebrows and blinking his humorous eyes.