"Well, here's your letter at last!" Eve came up the newly graveled path. She'd been to town with Miss Rose to do some errands and get the mail. My heart gave the little leap that it always does at the sight of the thin paper envelope, bearing the Chinese stamp. Aunt Cal came out to listen as I read it aloud:
Your account of your adventures at Craven House gave us quite as much of a thrill as they must have given you. I am immensely pleased that Calliope has decided to move into the old place. I remember it well. Your mother and I stopped there with you when you were three years old, and your curious recollection of the cupboard by the fireplace undoubtedly dates from that visit.
Your mother had come down for a last visit with your grandmother Poole before we sailed for the East. It was just after your Aunt Cal had married and gone West to live. We stopped for a call on Captain Judd Craven, a fine old man of the best seafaring traditions. We were grieved to get the news of his death the following year.
I recall the big front parlor and the jar of some sort of incense on the cabinet. Very likely you got a good whiff of it, one that your sensitive nerves of smell have never forgotten. The associative power of odors is well known, and so the cupboard and particularly the china duck which you say it contained became associated in your mind with the strange new smell. Thus when you smelled it again, even after the lapse of thirteen years, the particular brain cells into which the memory had been packed away released the recollection. I have heard of many similar instances, but few which have led to so dramatic a development as in your case."
"Well, well, that does beat all!" exclaimed Aunt Cal. "And to think of your being only three at the time!"
"I think it's perfectly weird!" said Eve.
"Not weird at all," I said. "Just perfectly normal and scientific as Dad explains. And I must say I'm glad to have it established that I'm not subject to trances or--what was it--cataleptic fits as Hamish so darkly hinted!"
"There's Michael, and in a clean shirt too, if my eyes do not deceive me! Let's go tell him about it, he'll be frightfully interested."
Hurriedly skimming through the rest of my letter--leaving the real reading of it till bedtime--I followed Eve across the yard. Aunt Cal went inside again to superintend the cutting of the cake, leaving the big front door wide open as it stood most of the time nowadays. This was against all the conventions of Old Beecham, but Aunt Cal was too busy just now to give much thought to the conventions.