realized that it was part of a broken cane. She did not know when or why it had been broken, but she knew it was Blair's, and her eyes smarted with tears. "Oh, how she loved him!" she thought, and drew a breath of satisfaction remembering how she had helped that speechless, dying love to express itself. She was standing there before the open drawer, lifting things up, then putting them back again, unable to decide what to do with any of them, when Elizabeth suddenly burst in: "Nannie!" "Oh, I am so glad you've come!" Nannie said. She made a helpless gesture. "Elizabeth, what _shall_ I do with everything?" Elizabeth shook her head; the question which she had hurried down here to ask paused before such forlorn preoccupation. "Of course her dresses Harris will give away--" "Oh no!" Elizabeth interrupted, shrinking. "Don't give them to a servant." "But," poor Nannie protested, "they are so dreadful, Elizabeth. Nobody can possibly wear them, except people like some of Harris's friends. But things like these--what would you do with these?" She held out a discolored pasteboard box broken at the corners and with no lid; a pair of onyx earrings lay in the faded blue cotton. "I never saw her wear them but once, and they are _so_ ugly," Nannie mourned. "Nannie," Elizabeth said, "I want to ask you something. That certificate Mrs. Maitland gave Blair: what made her give it to him?" Nannie put the pasteboard box back in the drawer and turned sharply to face her sister-in-law, who was sitting on the edge of Mrs. Maitland's narrow iron bed; the scared attention of her eyes banished their vagueness. "What made her give it to him? Why, love, of course! Don't you suppose Mamma loved Blair better than anybody in the world, even if he did--displease her?" "Uncle thinks you may have influenced her to give it to him." "I did not!" "Did you suggest it to her, Nannie?" "I asked her once, while she was ill, wouldn't she please be nice to Blair,--if you call that suggesting! As for the certificate, that last morning she sort of woke up, and told me to bring it to her to sign. And I did." She turned back to the bureau, and put an unsteady hand down into the drawer. The color was rising in her face, and a muscle in her cheek twitched painfully. "But Nannie," Elizabeth said, and paused; the dining-room door had opened, and Robert Ferguson was standing on the threshold of Mrs. Maitland's room looking in at the two girls. The astonishment he had felt in his talk with his niece had deepened into perplexity. "I guess I'll thresh this thing out now," he said to himself, and picked up his hat. He was hardly ten minutes behind Elizabeth in her walk down to the Maitland house.