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240 ring. That, at least, must bring more joy than grief to him. He would recognize that it must be his mother's wedding ring; if it told him that his mother must be dead, it would tell him that she had been married, or had believed that she was married!

Suddenly she heard him calling her. "Miss Sherrill!" His voice had a sharp thrill of excitement.

She hurried toward the sun room. She could see him through the doorway, bending over the card table with the things spread out upon its top in front of him.

"Miss Sherrill!" he called again.

"Yes."

He straightened; he was very pale. "Would coins that my father had in his pocket all have been more than twenty years old?"

She ran and bent beside him over the coins. "Twenty years!" she repeated. She was making out the dates of the coins now herself; the markings were eroded, nearly gone in some instances, but in every case enough remained to make plain the date. "Eighteen-ninety—1893—1889," she made them out. Her voice hushed queerly. "What does it mean?" she whispered.

He turned over and re-examined the articles with hands suddenly steadying. "There are two sets of things here," he concluded. "The muffler and paper of directions—they belonged to my father. The other things—it isn't six months or less than six months that they've lain in sand and water to become worn like this; it's twenty years. My father can't have had these things; they were somewhere else, or some one else had them. He wrote his directions to that person