“Oh dear,” groaned Aunt Sarah, creeping out of her nap and chair, “if you are going into another catechism about those old letters, I am going to bed;” and she left the room, not staying long enough to understand that this was a new mystery, and not a vain rediscussing of the old one.

It seemed that Robert had been down cellar to see that the furnace fire was in order for the night.  As soon as he reached the top of the stairs, in coming up, he remembered that he had not turned the outside damper properly, and went back to do it.

“I wasn’t gone three minutes, sir, and when I came back there lay the letter, right side up, square in the middle of the stairs; and I’d take my Bible oath, sir, as ’twan’t there when I went down.”

“Who was in the hall when you went down, Robert?” said my uncle sternly.

“Nobody, sir.  Every servant in the house had gone to bed, except Jane” (my aunt’s maid), “and she was going up the stairs over my head, sir, when I first went down into the cellar.  I know she was, sir, for she called through the stairs to me, and she says, ‘Master’ll hear you, Robert.’  You see, sir, Jane and me didn’t know as it was so late, and we was frightened when we heard the clock strike half-past eleven.”

“That will do, Robert,” said Uncle Jo.  “You can go,” and Robert disappeared, relieved but puzzled.  There seemed no possible explanation of the appearance of the letter there and then, except that hands had placed it there during the brief interval of Robert’s being in the cellar.  There were no human hands in the house which could have done it.  Was a restless ghost wandering there, bent on betraying poor Esther’s secrets to strangers?  What did it, what could it mean?

“Will you read this one with me, Nell?” said my uncle, turning it over reverently and opening it.

“No,” I said, “but I will watch you read it;” and I sat down on the floor at his feet.

The letter was very short; he read it twice without speaking; and then said, in an unsteady voice:  “This is an earlier letter than the other, I think.  This is a joyous one; poor Esther!  I believe I know her whole story.  But the mystery is inexplicable!  I would take down these walls if I thought I could get at the secret.”

Long past midnight we sat and talked it all over; and racked our brains in vain to invent any theory to account for the appearance of the letters on that cellar stairway.  My uncle’s tender interest in the poor dead Esther was fast being overshadowed by the perplexing mystery.

A few days after this, Mary the cook found another of the letters when she first went down-stairs in the morning, and Robert placed it by my uncle’s plate, with the rest of his mail.  It was the strangest one of all, for there was not a word of writing in it that could be read.  It was a foreign letter; some lines of the faded old postmarks were still visible on the back.  The first page looked as if it had been written over with some sort of sympathetic ink; but not a word could be deciphered.  Folded in a small piece of the thinnest of paper was a mouldy and crumbling flower, of a dull-brown color; on the paper was written,—­“Pomegranate blossom, from Jaffa,” and a few lines of poetry, of which we could make out only here and there a word.