“Oh, but we’re going to give it to Miss Natty!” came a chorus of determined little voices. “And Miss Cynthia said it was something awful rich,” added Sheila, “and I just guess that it must be a great big jewel, or a pot of gold.” “Sure, and we want Miss Natty to have it,” ended Danny, with big, disappointed eyes. This was not the first time that Mrs. Page had had to do away with a seeming mystery connected with Mrs. Renwick’s peculiar instructions. For the mystery-room had proved a source of morbid curiosity to the children, as they questioned as to what was behind that great, dark red curtain. They would scurry by the door with bated breath and big, excited eyes, in whose depths lurked a latent fear of some unknown terror, until Mrs. Page had ordered the curtain down, declaring that the door simply closed, and barred, would end the mystery. Fortunately the children’s attention was now turned to other matters, but Nathalie, somehow, could not put the incident from her mind. She had a vague, conscience-stricken feeling that _she_ would never gain the reward for being industrious, for although she had not failed to make an entry in her diary, she _had failed_ to search as diligently as she should have done. Whereupon, with a silent vow that she would put aside an hour every day for this disagreeable task, she hastened upstairs to put her plan in execution. Nathalie was lying in the hammock in the moonlight a few evenings later, half-drowsing. She was more than usually tired, for they had spent the day at Butternut Lodge. It had been an all-day hike, setting forth in the forenoon with a climb up old Garnet, starting in at the log gate-posts opposite Peckett’s flower-garden. Ascending a grassy incline studded with rocks, where mountain-sheep and a gray donkey meandered, nibbling the coarse grass, they entered the cool damp of the forest gloom, where hundreds of trees confronted them. Age-ringed and gnarled, their limbs twisted in eerie contortion to grotesque shapes, they stood in the dim cathedral light bristling with shadows, a battalion of ghoulish-looking sentinels, guarding the rock-crowned heights. But on they climbed, up the pine-needled path, stepping from lichen-covered rocks to gnarled tree-roots, or clambering deftly over blackened, flame-licked tree-trunks, that barred their way like yawning chasms. Every now and then they would stop to gather some tiny wood posy peeping coquettishly from the crevice of a broken crag, or a crimson-dyed leaf on a mossy patch, or to brush aside the black loam to burrow among dead leaves for feathery ferns, or one of the tiny umbrellas, as Sheila called the many-colored toadstools that grew by the path. But when the little maid spied a _fleur des fées_, a daintily-colored anemone, her delight was beyond bounds.