No matter what happens the trivialities of life must go on. Food must be cooked and eaten, no matter how dry it tastes. Work must be done. Judy knew that and dragged her tired body out of bed. She dressed and went down into the kitchen where Mary made coffee and brought out the toaster. Pauline had left for school, she said. Would Judy mind the toast herself?

She nodded, staring at the coffeepot and wondering if Irene would ever sit across the breakfast table and drink coffee with her again. She let the toast burn and threw it away. Then she put on a second piece, watched it until it turned golden brown and flipped it over.

The doorbell rang!

Always, when the doorbell rang, there came that sudden exaltation. It might be news of Irene! Peter might have found her! With each new disappointment Judy’s hopes for Irene’s safe return sank lower.

This time it was not Peter. It was Arthur Farringdon-Pett, the young pilot-engineer, who owned his own airplane and had taken Judy for a never-to-be-forgotten ride far above the beautiful St. Lawrence River. Judy’s brother, Horace, stood in the doorway beside him, and both of them looked as if they had not slept for a week. Horace’s usually sleek hair was disordered and Arthur needed a shave. He was the first to speak.

“Any news of Irene?”

“Didn’t you bring any?” she asked. And before they could answer she went on saying how sure she was that they must have news or they wouldn’t have flown all the way to New York. She could tell they had been flying as they were still dressed for it.

“We were in too much of a hurry to bother changing these togs at the hangar where I left the plane,” Arthur explained.

“That’s all right,” Judy murmured, trying to shake off the queer feeling she had that he was some stranger.

“We do have news,” Horace told her finally, “but, I’m sorry to say, it’s not news of Irene.”

“What is it then?”

“News of her mother. We thought it might help you find her. I mean Irene. Her mother, of course, is dead.”

“I knew that,” Judy said. “But she has relatives. I’m sure your news will help me.” Taking their things, she invited the boys to sit down and share her breakfast while they told her. She poured out the extra coffee Mary had made and pushed her brother into a chair. Arthur found his own and soon all three were seated beside the table. The boys explained their delay.

They had expected to arrive a day earlier but when Horace and Honey called at the sanitarium they found that Mr. Lang was gone. Immediately, Horace telephoned Arthur who agreed to help search for him in his plane. It would have been easy to find him if, as they expected, he had taken the straight road for New York. But his crippled legs gave out and, toward evening, they found him helpless in the edge of a deep wood. Here, while they were waiting for the ambulance to take him back to the hospital, Mr. Lang told his story.

When Tom Lang was a young man, only eighteen or twenty, he had worked as a chauffeur for a wealthy family in Brooklyn. The daughter of the house gave parties, a great many of them, and after the parties Tom would drive the whole crowd of young people home. He never paid much attention to them until, one night, a new girl came to a party. She was different from all the others. She had glamour, radiance, all the qualities a man wants in a girl. But the young chauffeur dared not hope that she would have any use for him. She only came to the one party—like a princess in her golden dress and slippers. He took her home and remembered the house. After that he would drive past it, always hoping that she would see him.

And one day she did! She waved to him from the tower window. Finally he understood, from the motion of her hand, that she wanted to come down—and couldn’t. The door locked from the outside, and her tiny key was of no use from within. Clutching it in her hand, she leaned farther and farther out of the tower window.

Just like the princess in Tom’s old fairy book. He would be the brave knight and rescue her. There was a rope in the car. It had been used as a towing rope but would now serve a nobler purpose.

He swung one end of it up to the tower; he saw the slim white hand reach out and grasp it, the lithe body throw itself over the window sill and descend—slowly, slowly. She was almost to the ground when the rope came loose from where she had fastened it.

She fell!

Quick as a flash, Tom Lang caught her in his strong young arms. That same day he made her his bride. She lived just long enough to bear him a little daughter, the image of herself. Heartbroken, Irene’s father had never spoken of her. But he had saved her golden wedding dress and on Irene’s seventeenth birthday sent it to her with a letter explaining his gift and enclosing the key to her tower room. His Annie had been just seventeen.

“Romantic, wasn’t it?” Arthur asked after Horace had told the story as only a reporter could tell it.

Judy, who had listened to it all without making any comment, admitted that it was the most romantic true story she had ever heard.

“But Mr. Lang didn’t give Irene the name or address,” Arthur said thoughtfully. “He only sent the key to her mother’s room because he wanted her to have it as a remembrance. In fact, he told so little in his letter that it seems impossible—unthinkable—that she could have found her grandmother——”

“Unless she found the same description somewhere else,” Judy interrupted.

“Yes, but where?”

“In her grandmother’s poems. She and I read them together.”

Judy did not add that the manuscripts were now missing and that she felt almost certain that Irene had taken them to help locate her relatives. That knowledge was confined to four persons: Pauline, Dale Meredith, Peter and herself.

The fact that Irene’s grandmother wrote poems surprised Arthur. He had heard the popular song, Golden Girl, but had never connected it with Irene, probably, because he had never seen her in her mother’s golden dress.

“And you say the poet’s name is Glenn?”

“It’s really Holiday,” Judy explained. “She wrote under a nom de plume.”

But the boys couldn’t remember ever hearing the name Joy Holiday. Mr. Lang had called his wife simply Annie.

When Judy had finished a complete account of the police search through Sarah Glenn’s house they were more puzzled than ever. But they appeared to be simply puzzled—not alarmed.

“We’ll find out all about it,” Horace promised, “when we find Irene.”

It was good to hear them saying “when.” It gave Judy new courage. She would need courage to get through that day. She told them her plans. First they were to get in touch with the police to learn what they could of the funeral that had been held in Sarah Glenn’s house. Judy then suggested that Horace and Arthur call on Dale Meredith and ask his advice while she spent a few hours in Emily Grimshaw’s office.

“I’ll be of more use there than anywhere else,” she said. “Besides, it’s my job and I’m being paid for it. Irene comes first, of course. But the police are doing all they can, and if I could see Emily Grimshaw and talk with her—well, I might find out some things that even the police don’t know. We discovered a card on the floor when we searched the poet’s house. It showed that my employer must have attended the funeral.”

Both boys agreed that Emily Grimshaw’s office was the place for Judy. Knowing that there must be stacks of papers for her to read and correct, Judy even consented to their plan that she go to the office at once and await news of Irene there. They would go on to the Parkville police station and telephone her. Peter had gone there and they might meet him.

After giving them explicit directions, Judy walked with them as far as the subway station at Union Square. There they separated, Judy taking the uptown train while the boys boarded an express for Brooklyn.

Horace turned to Arthur and spoke above the roar of the train.

“What puzzles me is how Irene found that house with nothing but a few crazy verses to go by, and I think that Judy knows if only she would tell.”

“She certainly knows something more,” he agreed, “but I’m not worrying. Judy is on the square.”

“I believe she is,” Horace replied, “but what about Irene?”