The prisoning hands fell away from Miss Hamilton’s eyes revealing five laughing girls clustered at one side of the historic chair in which the old lady sat, her expression one of keen enjoyment. She immediately held out her arms to Marjorie who slipped into them and kissed Miss Susanna on the forehead and on both cheeks.

“My dear, dear child. So you surprised me after all, though I have been on the watch for you. It was all Jonas’ fault. He fixed up this scheme.” Miss Susanna heartily returned Marjorie’s caress with every evidence of affection. Next she motioned each of the others to her and kissed her on the cheek, a mark of favor they had not expected from the matter-of-fact mistress of the Arms.

“You stole a march on me, and Jonas helped you!” she exclaimed when the first babel of greeting had subsided. “I’m glad you found me here. I’m going to do something for you now that I think you’ll like. Come, guess what. You made me guess.”

“Show us something of interest that was Mr. Brooke Hamilton’s,” Marjorie made instant guess.

“Um-m-m; partly right,” Miss Susanna put on a baffling expression.

“It’s a letter, or one of those papers,” hazarded Vera. “I mean what you are going to show us.”

“Right again, but not altogether right.” Miss Susanna was enjoying the moment of suspense.

“It’s tea I can read in your eye, and I’ll guess again it’s been put off till this time each night this week,” Leila slyly asserted. “Oh, I have a fine reasoning power.” Leila showed her white teeth affably, “though there are those who do not believe it.”

“Clever Leila!” Miss Susanna clapped her hands. “You’ve guessed the other half of my intention. I decided to have my tea late this week in case you girls dropped in on me. Kathie said that Marjorie would probably arrive when she came on the late afternoon train. I guessed the firm of Page and Dean would meet at the station,” she said with humor.

“We did,” Marjorie’s light tone grew serious. “Oh, Miss Susanna, we saw, coming to the campus. We hardly know how to begin to thank you for the help you’ve given us. It means so much to us, who wish the work on the dormitory to progress, but even more to the girls who will live in the dormitory when it is completed.” Marjorie had re-taken the old lady’s hands in hers, pressing them gratefully.

Her friends and Jonas stood looking on at the fond little scene between the once crabbed mistress of the Arms and the gentle girl whose high principles and unfailing courtesy had won her the friendship of the difficult, embittered last of the Hamiltons.

“Never mind about that dormitory business now!” Miss Susanna held up an imperious hand. “I’ll talk with you of it some other day—perhaps.” She broke into a smile. “Jonas,” she turned to the old man, “bring the tea up here.”

“I used to have tea here occasionally with Uncle Brooke when I was a young girl,” she told her interested guests. “He had tea promptly at half-past four every afternoon when he was at home, and usually in the study.”

The Travelers listened almost breathlessly for her to continue. They were “positively greedy” for even scraps of information concerning the founder of Hamilton.

“All the tea he used was shipped to him from China. He never ate anything for tea except a few small, sweet English crackers. But how he liked tea! He would drink three cups, always. When I had tea with him he would have Jonas bring me the choicest marmalade and conserves, and little fancy rolls and sweet cakes. He would make an occasion of our tea drinking.” Miss Susanna’s face softened. She smiled reminiscently.

A pleasant silence ensued, broken only by the slight rustling of the papers on the table which Miss Hamilton was turning over. She drew from among the stack a long sheet of yellowed fine paper. It was spread open and written closely on one side.

“While we are waiting for Jonas to bring the tea,” she said, an absent look in her eyes, “I will keep my promise and read you a letter that Uncle Brooke intended for the Marquis de Lafayette.”

A sighing breath went up from the listeners who were now seated about the library table.

“It seems so strange; to know some one who knew someone else who knew Lafayette,” Robin said wonderingly.

“So it does, until one stops to consider how long it was after the war of the Revolution before Lafayette came back to visit America. He came here in the year of 1824. Uncle Brooke was a very young man then. He was my great uncle, you must bear in mind. Lafayette was about sixty-six years of age when he made the American visit. He died ten years afterward. He and Uncle Brooke corresponded regularly during the last years of Lafayette’s life. The letter I shall read to you is, I imagine, the draft of a letter he composed to Lafayette. It is neither finished nor signed.”

With this explanation Miss Susanna began in her concise utterance:

Miss Susanna looked up from the paper. “That’s all,” she said abruptly. “I suppose he made a copy of this letter, finished it and sent it to the Marquis. I wished to read it to you because, in looking among his papers and letters, this is the first mention he made of his dream of building a college for women.”

For a moment no one spoke. The spell of the unfinished letter of long ago gripped the hearers. The generous, purposeful personality of its writer made itself felt across the years.

Jonas, trundling a tea wagon into the study, brought them out of the historic past.

“How I wish we knew the rest of it,” Marjorie said, her brown eyes childishly wistful.

“I wish you knew, but you never will,” was Miss Susanna’s crisp reply. “I’ve hunted for what might be a continuation of that letter on another, similar sheet of paper, but have never found it.”

“It’s a glorious letter, even if it isn’t complete. It is full of hope and courage and resolve and conviction!” Katherine’s tones rang with admiration.

“How beautifully he wrote of his mother,” supplemented Vera.

“How well he wrote it all,” was Leila’s sweeping praise. “Too well not to have——” She paused. Carried away by impulse she had forgotten for the time the reason why the world could not have the history of a great man and his great work.

The sudden scarlet which flew to her own cheeks was no brighter than that which sprang into Miss Hamilton’s.

“I know what you meant, Leila. Even a few months ago I would have been so cross with you for having said what you were thinking.” Miss Susanna looked up from her arranging of the tea set on the library table and met Leila’s eyes squarely. “I’m not—now. You may finish what you started to say.” The permission was more like a half defiant command. It was as though the old lady had a sneaking desire to hear it.

“Too well not to have the world read it,” Leila repeated. “It’s of him I was thinking, Miss Susanna. He has a right to the high place he made for himself.”

“I wish the world knew him as I knew him—but not Hamilton College!” the old lady cried out in petulant vexation. “I should be happy to publish his biography if I had not the college to hold me back. The Board is only too eager for information concerning Uncle Brooke. The moment the world received it, they would receive it, too. The members of that miserable Board would merely laugh at me because they had gained their point through me in a roundabout way. Whatever concessions I have made have been made recently, and only to please you girls. Most of all, to please Marjorie. My reasons for turning against the Board of Hamilton College were sound. Still, I know that in the same circumstances Uncle Brooke would have made allowance for their despicable behavior. But I am I, Susanna Hamilton, stubborn as a mule, so my father sometimes said. I can revere Uncle Brooke with all my heart, but I can’t be like him.”