“But where,--where is Randal Ducie now?” asked Adrian, turning hastily to the door. The doctor’s face was a picture of uncomprehending perplexity. “Why, isn’t this you?” he asked. “Oh, no. It is my brother,” exclaimed Adrian, amidst a burst of laughter that relieved the tension of the situation. Several followed from the room to witness, at a distance not very discreet, the meeting of the facsimile brothers. Randal Ducie had hitched the horse and the four-seated phaeton which they had had the precaution to provide to the old rack, and, awaiting the return of the physician, had strolled aimlessly up the pavement through the rolling fog to the steps of the portico. There he was suddenly confronted by the image of himself. He looked startled for a moment; then, with a rising flush and a brightening eye, ascended the flight with an eager step. “Hello,” said one brother cavalierly. “Hello yourself,” responded the other. “Let me show you how the fellows kiss the cheek in old France,” said Adrian. “Let me show you how the fellows punch the head in old Mississippi,” said Randal. There was a momentary scuffle, and then, arm in arm and both near to tears, they strolled together down the long portico of their ancestral home with much to say to each other, after their separation, and much to hear. The group of men at the door, looking laughingly after them, might readily have discriminated the moment of the disclosure of the discovery of the Duciehurst treasure with the release of the mortgage foreclosed so long ago. Randal paused abruptly, facing round upon his brother and apparently listening in stunned amaze. They were too distant for words to be distinguished, but his voice came on the air, loud and excited, in eager questioning. He was, evidently, about to turn within the house, possibly to have the evidence of his eyes to the intendment and validity of this paper, when Adrian, by a gesture, checked him. The fog was beginning to lift, and the figures of the two men were imposed on a vista of green, where the sunlight in a delicate clarity after the rains, in a refined glister of matutinal gold, was beginning to send long glinting beams among the glossy foliage of the magnolias, and to light with reverent tapering shafts the solemn aisles of the weeping willows where the tombstones reared unchanged their mortuary memorials, unmindful of sheen or shadow, of fair weather or foul, even of time, as the years came and went, a monition only of death and a prophecy of eternity. “There is one thing I must tell you, Ran,” Adrian said, laying both hands on his brother’s shoulders. Randal threw up his head, excited, expectant, apprehensive. “_She_ is here,--one of the passengers of the _Cherokee Rose_.” “She?” exclaimed Randal in blank mystification. “Who?”