“How d’ye do, Cal?” she said, looking up for an instant to give him a nod.

He returned the greeting, and taking a chair by Mrs. Conly’s side, “All well, mother?” he asked.

“Quite.  You’re just in time to tell me whether these are going to look right.  You know we’ve never seen any, and have only your description to go by.”

She held up a completed roll.  It looked like a horn, tapering nearly to a point.

“I think so,” he said; “but, mother, you needn’t finish mine:  I shall never use it.”

“Calhoun Conly, what do you mean?” she cried, dropping the roll into her lap, and gazing at him with kindling eyes.

“You’re not going to back out of it now?” exclaimed Enna, leaving her machine, and approaching him in sudden and violent anger.  “You’d better take care, coward, they’ll kill you if you turn traitor; and right they should too.”

“I shall not turn traitor,” he said quietly, “but neither shall I go any farther than I have gone.  I should never have joined, if Boyd and Foster hadn’t deceived me as to the objects of the organization.”

“But you have joined, Cal, and I’ll not consent to your giving it up,” said his mother.

“I don’t like to vex you, mother,” he answered, reddening, “but—­”

“But you’ll have your own way, whether it displeases me or not?  A dutiful son, truly.”

“This is Horace’s work, and he’s a scalawag, if he is my brother,” cried Enna, with growing passion, “but if I were you, Cal Conly, I’d be man enough to have an opinion of my own, and stick to it.”

“Exactly what I’m doing, Aunt Enna.  I went into the thing blindfold; I have found out what it really is—­a cruel, cowardly, lawless concern—­and I wash my hands of it and its doings.”

Bowing ceremoniously he unlocked the door, and left the room.

Enna sprang to it and fastened it after him.  “If he was my son, I’d turn him out of the house.”

“Father would hardly consent,” replied her sister, “and if he did, what good would it do?  Horace or Travilla would take him in of course.”

“Well, thank heaven, Boyd and Foster are made of sterner stuff and our labor’s not all lost,” said Enna, returning to her machine.

The two ladies had been spending many hours every day in that room for a week past, no one but Calhoun being admitted to their secrets, for whether in the room or out of it they kept the door always carefully locked.

The curiosity of servants and children was strongly excited, but vain had been all their questions and coaxing, futile every attempt to solve the mystery up to the present time.

But three or four days after Calhoun’s return from the Oaks, the thought suggested itself to mischievous, prying Dick and his coadjutor Walter, that the key of some other lock in the house might fit that of the door they so ardently desired to open.  They only waited for a favorable opportunity to test the question in the temporary absence of their mothers from that part of the building, and to their great joy discovered that the key of the bedroom they shared together was the duplicate of the one which had so long kept their masculine curiosity at bay.