getting to be a true Pentland . . . believing that if I'm happy a calamity is soon to follow."
She had moments of late when it seemed to her that something in the air, some power hidden in the old house itself, was changing her slowly, imperceptibly, in spite of herself.
Miss Egan met her outside the door, with the fixed eternal smile which to-day seemed to Olivia the sort of smile that the countenance of Fate itself might wear.
"The old lady is more quiet," she said. "Higgins helped me and we managed to bind her in the bed so that she couldn't harm herself. It's surprising how much strength she has in her poor thin body." She explained that old Mrs. Pentland kept screaming, "Sabine! Sabine!" for Mrs. Callendar and that she kept insisting on being allowed to go into the attic.
"It's the old idea that she's lost something up there," said Miss Egan. "But it's probably only something she's imagined." Olivia was silent for a moment. "I'll go and search," she said. "It might be there is something and if I could find it, it would put an end to these spells."
She found them easily, almost at once, now that there was daylight streaming in at the windows of the cavernous attic. They lay stuffed away beneath one of the great beams . . . a small bundle of ancient yellowed letters which had been once tied together with a bit of mauve ribbon since torn in haste by some one who thrust them in this place of concealment. They had been opened carelessly and in haste, for the moldering paper was all cracked and torn along the edges. The ink, violet once, had turned to a dirty shade of brown.
Standing among the scattered toys left by Jack and Sybil
