At last I came to Aunt Jane.  I ripped open the envelope and drew out the letter—­a fat one, but then Aunt Jane’s letters are always fat.  She says herself that she is of those whose souls flow freely forth in ink but are frozen by the cold eye of an unsympathetic listener.  Nevertheless, as I spread out the close-filled pages I felt a mild wonder.  Writing so large, so black, so staggering, so madly underlined, must indicate something above, even Aunt Jane’s usual emotional level.  Perhaps in sober truth there was a missionary-experiment to “Find Capital after , or ;” Twenty minutes later I staggered into Bess’s room.

“Hush!” she said.  “Don’t wake the baby!”

“Baby or no baby,” I whispered savagely, “I’ve got to have a time-table.  I leave for the city tonight to catch the first steamer for Panama!”

Later, while the baby slumbered and I packed experiment to “Find Period in middle” explained.  This was difficult; not that Bess is as a general thing obtuse, but because the picture of Aunt Jane embarking for some wild, lone isle of the Pacific as the head of a treasure-seeking expedition was enough to shake the strongest intellect.  And yet, amid the welter of ink and eloquence which filled those fateful pages, there was the cold hard fact confronting you.  Aunt Jane was going to look for buried treasure, in company with one Violet Higglesby-Browne, whom she sprung on you without the slightest explanation, as though alluding to the Queen of Sheba or the Siamese twins.  By beginning at the end and reading backward—­Aunt Jane’s letters are usually most intelligible that way—­you managed to piece together some explanation of this Miss Higglesby-Browne and her place in the scheme of things.  It was through Miss Browne, whom she had met at a lecture upon Soul-Development, that Aunt Jane had come to realize her claims as an Individual upon the Cosmos, also to discover that she was by nature a woman of affairs with a talent for directing large enterprises, although adverse influences had hitherto kept her from recognizing her powers.  There was a dark significance in these italics, though whether they meant me or the family lawyer I was not sure.

Miss Higglesby-Browne, however, had assisted Aunt Jane to find herself, and as a consequence Aunt Jane, for the comparatively trifling outlay needful to finance the Harding-Browne expedition, would shortly be the richer by one-fourth of a vast treasure of Spanish doubloons.  The knowledge of this hoard was Miss Higglesby-Browne’s alone.  It had been revealed to her by a dying sailor in a London hospital, whither she had gone on a mission of kindness—­you gathered that Miss Browne was precisely the sort to take advantage when people were helpless and unable to fly from her.  Why the dying sailor chose to make Miss Browne the repository of his secret, I don’t know—­this still remains for me the unsolved mystery.  But when the sailor closed his eyes the secret and the map—­of course there was a map—­had become Miss Higglesby-Browne’s.