“After our hunger was appeased,—Janet said she got the supper, as we shall have to be our own maids up here,—Mr. Banker ‘personally conducted’ us through many high-ceiled rooms with recessed window-seats, big doors, and dark closets, up winding stairways and through rambling corridors. The antique furniture, carved and black-looking, musty-smelling and stuffy, made one feel as if long-ago-dead people were peering at you from the eerie shadows of the hide-and-seeky nooks. “Mr. Banker then read my aunt’s letter of instruction,—an odd document, as it stated that each one of ‘we girls,’—as Cynthia calls us,—she’s almost as old as mumsie,—during our stay is to search the house for the most valuable thing in it. And the lucky finder of the ‘mysterious it,’ as Jan and I call the valuable thing, is to inherit something. Whether this something is property, or money, or just some personal effects of my aunt’s, I don’t know, for that letter was so queer it made me feel creepy. And once when I glanced up, it really seemed as if her eyes were glaring menacingly at me from a large portrait of her which hangs over the library mantel. “Each one of us is to keep a diary, and if we have not looked for ‘It’ each day, we are to state what particular thing prevented us. We can search every nook and corner in the house but one room, the _mystery room_, as we call it, which is on the second floor, and barred and locked so that no one can enter. Mother only laughs when Janet and I talk about ‘It,’ and declares that the whole thing is just my aunt’s eccentric way of doing things. You know mother spent a summer up here with her when I was a wee tot, and my aunt grew very fond of me. “Although I have had no time as yet to search for the mystery of mysteries, my first entry in my diary reads: ‘Arose at 7 A. M. and prepared breakfast. Cooked three meals and did housework all day, and am too tired to do anything but go to bed. Jan meant to help me, but she had to hurry with her plowing, and Cynthia Loretto says she never does housework, as it makes her hands rough.’ “You would laugh if you could see Jan scratching the earth with a baby rake. She was going to plant before she plowed, and hadn’t the slightest idea as to the proper time and way of planting her seeds. But she looks a dear in a smock and a big pink sunbonnet that matches the pink in her cheeks and on her nose, for her dear little snub has burned to the same color.