Eloise parried her questions very skilfully, saying nothing except that her mother needed her and she was going to her, and Mrs. Biggs left her more mystified than she had ever been in her life, but resolved “to get at the bottom if she lived.”

That night Eloise, who was now sleeping in the chamber to which she had first been taken, sat a long time by her window, looking out upon the towers and chimneys of Crompton Place, which were visible above the trees in the park, and wondering at the feeling of unrest which possessed her, and her unwillingness to leave.

“If I could only see him once more before I go,” she thought, the “him” being Jack, who, with Howard Crompton, was in Worcester, attending a musical festival.

Not to see him was the saddest part of leaving Crompton, and for a moment hot tears rolled down her cheeks,—­tears which, if Jack could have seen and known their cause, would have brought him back from Worcester and the prima donna who that night was entrancing a crowded house with her song.  Dashing her tears away, Eloise’s thoughts reverted to Amy, who had been so kind to her.

“I hoped to thank her in person,” she said, “but as that is impossible, I must write her a note for Tim to take in the morning, together with the chairs.”

The note was written, and in it a regret expressed that Eloise could not have seen her.

“Maybe when she reads it she will call upon me to-morrow,” she thought, as she directed the note, and that night she dreamed that Amy came to her, with a face and voice so like her mother’s that she woke with a start and a feeling that she had really seen her mother, as she used to stand before the footlights, while the house rang with thunders of applause.

CHAPTER II

THE LITTLE RED CLOAK

Col.  Crompton was in a bad way, both mentally and bodily.  The pain in his gouty foot had extended to his knee, and was excruciating in the extreme; but he almost forgot it in the greater trouble in his mind.  In the same mail which had brought Eloise’s letter from California there had been one for him, which in the morning Peter had taken from the postman and examined carefully, until he made out its direction.

“Mister Kurnel Krompton, of Krompton Plais, Krompton, Massachusetts.”

So much room had been taken up on one side of the envelope with the address, that half of “Massachusetts” was on the other side, and Peter’s memory instantly went back to years before, when a letter looking like this and odorous with bad tobacco had come to the Colonel.  He had a copy of the letter still, and could repeat it by heart, and knew that it was from Jake Harris,—­presumably the “Shaky” for whom the little girl Eudora had cried so pitifully.  This was undoubtedly from the same source.  “What can he want now? and what will the Colonel say?” he thought, as he took the letter to his master’s room.