shameless pinchbeck. "Had you any idea she had kept
them?"
"I don't at all believe she HAD kept them or knew they
were there, and I'm very sure my father didn't. They
had quite equally worked off any tenderness for the
connexion. These odds and ends, which she thought
had been given away or destroyed, had simply got thrust
into a dark corner and been forgotten."
Charlotte wondered. "Where then did you find them?"
"In that old tin box"--and the young man pointed to the
receptacle from which he had dislodged them and which
stood on a neighbouring chair. "It's rather a good box
still, but I'm afraid I can't give you THAT."
The girl took no heed of the box; she continued only to
look at the trinkets. "What corner had she found?"
"She hadn't 'found' it," her companion sharply insisted;
"she had simply lost it. The whole thing had passed
from her mind. The box was on the top shelf of the old
school-room closet, which, until one put one's head into
it from a step-ladder, looked, from below, quite cleared
out. The door's narrow and the part of the closet to the
left goes well into the wall. The box had stuck there for
years."
Charlotte was conscious of a mind divided and a vision
vaguely troubled, and once more she took up two or
7
HYLAND
