Page:Ballinger Price--Fortune of the Indies.djvu/67

 kissed your hand, and Mark dipped the pennant for us. It was the Gloria's last voyage. 'Miss Nelly and Miss Lucy'! Oh, how odd it seems, my dear!"

Jane, standing beside the secretary, felt suddenly extremely young and as though the letter were no longer her letter at all. She was trying to picture gently-faded little Aunt Ellen in a lavender silk frock laughing among the wisteria flowers on their very same doorstep. And then, queerly enough, she felt immensely old and somehow very sorry, and flung her arms suddenly around both the old ladies.

"O Aunties!" she cried. "Oh, I wish it were then!" and came more near to crying then she usually did.

But all this, though quite fascinating as a discovery, threw no more light than ever on the Fortune of the Indies, and the exhibition was to close in a week.

"Then it'll go back to Boston, and we'll never never see it again," Jane mourned to her brothers. "If he'd only said that his heirs and assigns forever would see that it was sold to nobody but an Ingram, at least!"

"Well, he didn't," Alan said. "You ought