“Don’t attempt to describe it, Norah.  Go on with your story instead.”

“Very well.  My story takes me straight into one of the rooms at St. Crux—­a room about as long as your street here—­so dreary, so dirty, and so dreadfully cold that I shiver at the bare recollection of it.  Miss Garth was for getting out of it again as speedily as possible, and so was I. But the housekeeper declined to let us off without first looking at a singular piece of furniture, the only piece of furniture in the comfortless place.  She called it a tripod, I think. (There is nothing to be alarmed at, Magdalen; I assure you there is nothing to be alarmed at!) At any rate, it was a strange, three-legged thing, which supported a great panful of charcoal ashes at the top.  It was considered by all good judges (the housekeeper told us) a wonderful piece of chasing in metal; and she especially pointed out the beauty of some scroll-work running round the inside of the pan, with Latin mottoes on it, signifying—­I forget what.  I felt not the slightest interest in the thing myself, but I looked close at the scroll-work to satisfy the housekeeper.  To confess the truth, she was rather tiresome with her mechanically learned lecture on fine metal work; and, while she was talking, I found myself idly stirring the soft feathery white ashes backward and forward with my hand, pretending to listen, with my mind a hundred miles away from her.  I don’t know how long or how short a time I had been playing with the ashes, when my fingers suddenly encountered a piece of crumpled paper hidden deep among them.  When I brought it to the surface, it proved to be a letter—­a long letter full of cramped, close writing.—­You have anticipated my story, Magdalen, before I can end it!  You know as well as I do that the letter which my idle fingers found was the Secret Trust.  Hold out your hand, my dear.  I have got George’s permission to show it to you, and there it is!”

She put the Trust into her sister’s hand.  Magdalen took it from her mechanically.  “You!” she said, looking at her sister with the remembrance of all that she had vainly ventured, of all that she had vainly suffered, at St. Crux—­“you have found it!”

“Yes,” said Norah, gayly; “the Trust has proved no exception to the general perversity of all lost things.  Look for them, and they remain invisible.  Leave them alone, and they reveal themselves!  You and your lawyer, Magdalen, were both justified in supposing that your interest in this discovery was an interest of no common kind.  I spare you all our consultations after I had produced the crumpled paper from the ashes.  It ended in George’s lawyer being written to, and in George himself being recalled from the Continent.  Miss Garth and I both saw him immediately on his return.  He did what neither of us could do—­he solved the mystery of the Trust being hidden in the charcoal ashes.  Admiral Bartram, you must know, was all his life subject to fits of somnambulism.  He had