CHAPTER I A MYSTERIOUS PAPER

“W-1755-15x12-6754,” read Desiré slowly. “What does it mean?”

“What does what mean, Dissy?” asked her younger sister, who was rolling a ball across the floor to little René.

“Just some figures on an old paper I found, dear. I must tell Jack about them. Do you know where he is?”

“Out there somewhere, I guess,” replied the child, with a vague gesture indicating the front yard.

Desiré flung back her short dark curls and crossed the room to a window where sturdy geraniums raised their scarlet clusters to the very top of the panes. It was the custom in that part of Nova Scotia to make a regular screen of blossoming plants in all front windows, sometimes even in those of the cellar. Peering between two thick stems, she could see her older brother sitting on the doorstep, gazing out across St. Mary’s Bay which lay like a blue, blue flag along the shore.

Crossing the narrow hall and opening the outside door, Desiré dropped down beside the boy and thrust a time-yellowed slip of paper into his hands.

“Did you ever see this?”

“Yes,” he replied slowly. “A few days before he died, nôtre père went over the contents of his tin box with me to make sure that I understood all about the bills, and the mortgage on the farm and—”

“Mortgage!” exclaimed Desiré in shocked tones. “I never knew we had one.”

“I, either, until that day. You see nôtre mère was sick so long that all our little savings were used up, and ready money was an absolute necessity.”

“And what did he tell you about this?” continued the girl, after a thoughtful pause, running her finger along the line of tantalizing characters.

“Nothing very definite. He said it was a memorandum of some kind that had been handed down in our family for generations. The name of its writer, and its meaning, have been lost in the past; but each father passed it on to his eldest son, with a warning to preserve it most carefully, for it was valuable.”

“And now it belongs to you,” concluded Desiré, half sadly, half proudly.

Jack nodded, and for several moments neither spoke.

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