"There doesn't seem to be anything to help on those," he said, disappointed. "Let's have a look at the jewelry." Chicken Little unwrapped the ring from its layers of tissue paper, and handed it to him. Captain Clarke took it, regarded the flat golden circle intently for an instant, then turned it to read the inscription. A pained cry broke from his lips. Chicken Little glanced hastily up to find him holding the ring in shaking fingers, staring off into vacancy. "Juanita!" he whispered, "Juanita!" Chicken Little touched his hands in distress. "Captain--Captain Clarke, what is it?" He looked down at her with a start. "I--it is----Excuse me a moment, Chicken Little." He walked into his bedroom with the ring still in his hand and closed the door. Chicken Little waited and waited, not knowing whether she ought to go and tell Sherm what she suspected. It seemed too strange to be possible. And if it were true, surely Captain Clarke would want to tell him himself. Perhaps she oughtn't to be there. She rose softly and slipped out to Wing in the kitchen. After a time she heard Sherm get up from his seat on the veranda step and go into the library. Immediately after, the bedroom door opened and she heard the murmur of voices. She left a message with Wing and running quietly out to Calico, untied him, and rode home in the twilight. * * * * * "You needn't ever say again, Ernest Morton," she wrote to her brother the next evening, "that E. P. Roe's stories are too goody-goody and fishy to be interesting. He can't hold a candle to what's happened to the Captain and Sherm. I have to go round pinching myself to believe it is really so. I am almost afraid I will wake up and find it isn't, still. Do you remember the picture of the Captain's little boy that looked like Sherm? Well, it was Sherm. I can hear you say: 'What in the dickens?' So, I'll put you out of suspense right away. The Captain's boy was not dead, only lost, and he is Sherm or Sherm is he, whichever way is right--I'm sure I don't know. You see the Captain went off on a long voyage and got shipwrecked and was gone ages and ages. And Juanita's father and mother were way off in California--they used to be Spanish. That's what made them so foreign-looking in the locket picture. Well, nobody knows exactly what happened. When the Captain got back to New York and hunted up the boarding house where she had lived, they said she had left six months before to go to her parents in California. Captain Clarke wrote to California and found that her father was dead and her mother hadn't heard from Juanita for months, and didn't know anything about her coming home. Wasn't it dreadful? He paid detectives to hunt her up, but they never found the slightest clue. The Captain thought she'd gone off and left him on purpose--that's what made him such a woman-hater--and so sad all the time. You wouldn't know him now. He looks like Merry Christmas all the year round.