The dead mother was not as real to her as the living Jake, to whom she said, “As you talk to me I remember something of her, and people making a noise.  But it is long ago, and much has happened since.  I can’t cry.  Is it wrong?”

She looked at Eloise, who replied, “No, darling; you have cried enough for one day.  Some time we will come here again, and you’ll remember more.  Let us go.”

“What is your plan now?” Mr. Mason asked Jack when, after a half hour spent with Jake, they were driving back to the Brock House.

“I have been thinking,” Jack replied, “that I will leave the ladies for a few days at the hotel, while I go to Palatka and Atlanta, and see if anything can be learned of the Browns, or Harrises, or the Hardy plantation, where the marriage took place.  I wish to get all the facts I can, although the certificate should be sufficient to establish Mrs. Amy’s right to the estate.  I don’t think she realizes her position, as heir to the finest property in Crompton.”

She didn’t realize it at all, but was very willing to stay at the Brock House with Eloise, while Jack went to Palatka and Atlanta to see what he could find.  It was not much.  Tom Hardy had been killed in the war, and had left no family.  This he was told in Palatka.  In Atlanta he learned that before the war there had been a plantation near the city owned by a Hardy family, all of whom were dead or had disappeared.  There were Browns in plenty in the Directory, and Jack saw them all, but none had any connection with the Harrises.  At last he struck an old negress, who had belonged to the Hardys, and who remembered a double wedding at the plantation years before, and who said that an Andrew Jackson Brown, who must have been present, as he was a son of the house, was living in Boston, and was a conductor of a street car.  With this information as the result of his search Jack went back to Enterprise, where he found Amy greatly improved in mind and body.  Every day Jake and Mandy Ann had been to see her, or with Eloise she had driven to the clearing, where her dormant faculties continued to awaken with the familiar objects of her childhood.  Many people and much talking still bewildered her, and her memory was treacherous on many points, but to a stranger who knew nothing of her history she seemed a quiet, sane woman, “not a bit quar,” Eloise said to Jack as she welcomed him back.  “And I believe she will continue to improve when we get her home, away from the people who talk to her so much and confuse her.  When can we go?”

“To-morrow, if you like,” Jack said, and the next day they left Enterprise, after bidding an affectionate good-by to Mandy Ann, with whom they left a substantial remembrance of their visit.

Amy would have liked to take the twins with her, but Eloise said, “Not yet, mother; wait and see, and perhaps they will all come later.”

It was sure that Jakey was to follow them soon and spend as much time with them as he pleased.