Mrs. Hallam's companion; and The Spring Farm, and other tales

by Mary Jane Holmes

THE HEPBURN LINE.

CHAPTER I.—Doris’s Story.
MY AUNTS.

I had come from my mother’s burial to the rector’s house, where I was to stay until it should be known what disposition would be made of me by my father’s aunts, the Misses Morton, who lived at Morton Park, near Versailles, Kentucky. Of these aunts I knew little, except that there were three of them now, but there had been four, and my great-grandfather, an eccentric old man, had called them respectively, Keziah, Desire, Maria and Beriah which odd names he had shortened into Kizzy and Dizzy, Rier and Brier. My father, who had lived with them when a boy, had often talked of Morton Park, and once when he was telling me of the grand old house, with its wide piazza and Corinthian pillars, its handsome grounds and the troop of blacks ready to come at his call, I had asked him why he didn’t go back there, saying I should like it better than our small cottage, where there were no grounds and no Corinthian pillars and no blacks to wait upon us. For a moment he did not answer, but glanced at my mother with a look of unutterable tenderness, then, drawing us both closely to him, he said, “If I go there I must leave you behind; and I would rather have mamma and you than all the blacks and Corinthian pillars in the world.”

Although very young, I felt intuitively that Morton Park was not a pleasant topic of conversation, and I rarely spoke of it to him after that, but I often thought of it, with its Corinthian pillars for which I had a great reverence, and of the blacks, and the maple-trees, and the solid silver from which my aunts dined every day, and wondered when they were so rich why we were so poor and why my father worked as hard as I knew he did, for he often lay upon the couch, saying he was tired, and looking very pale about his mouth, with a bright red spot on either cheek. I heard some one call these spots “the hectic,” but did not know what this meant until later on, when he stayed in bed all the time and the doctor said he was dying with quick consumption. Then there came a day when I was called from school and hurried home to find him dead,—my handsome young father, who had always been so loving to me, and whose last words were, “Tell little Doris to be a good girl and kind to her mother. God bless her!”

The blow was so sudden that for a time my mother seemed stunned and incapable of action, but she was roused at last by a letter from my Aunt Keziah, to whom she had written after my father’s death. I say a letter, but it was only an envelope containing a check for a hundred dollars and a slip of paper with the words, “For Gerold’s child,” and when my mother saw it there was a look on her face which I had never seen before, and I think her first impulse was to tear up the check, but, reflecting that it was not hers to destroy, she only burned the paper and put the money in the bank for me, and then went bravely to work to earn her living and mine, sometimes taking boarders, sometimes going out to nurse sick people, and at last doing dressmaking at home and succeeding so well that I never knew what real poverty was, and was as happy and free from care as children usually are.

My father had been an artist, painting landscapes and portraits when he could find sale for them, and, when he could not, painting houses, barns and fences, for although he had been reared in the midst of luxury, and, as I now know, belonged to one of the best families in Kentucky, he held that all kinds of labor, if necessary, were honorable, and was not ashamed to stand in his overalls side by side with men who in birth and education were greatly his inferiors. At the time of his death he had in his studio a few pictures which had not been sold. Among them was a small one of the house in Morton Park, with its huge white pillars and tall trees in front, and one or two negroes playing under the trees. This I claimed for my own, and also another, which was a picture of his four aunts taken in a group in what seemed to be a summer-house. “The Quartette,” he called it, and I had watched him with a great deal of interest as he brought into seeming real life the four faces so unlike each other, Aunt Kizzy, stern and severe and prim, with a cap on her head after the English style, which she affected because her grandfather was English,—Aunt Dizzy, who was very pretty and very youthfully dressed, with flowers in her hair,—Aunt Rier, a gentle, matronly woman, with a fat baby in her lap which I did not think particularly good-looking,—and Aunt Brier, with a sweet face like a Madonna and a far-away look in her soft gray eyes which reminded one of Evangeline. Behind the four was my father, leaning over Aunt Rier and holding a rose before the baby, who was trying to reach it. The picture fascinated me greatly, and when I heard it was to be sold, with whatever other effects there were in the studio, I begged to keep it. But my mother said No, with the same look on her face which I had seen when she burned Aunt Kizzy’s letter. And so it was sold to a gentleman from Boston, who was spending the summer in Meadowbrook, and I thought no more of it until years after, when it was brought to my mind in a most unexpected manner.

I was ten when I lost my father, and fourteen when my mother, too, died suddenly, and I was alone, with no home except the one the rector kindly offered me until something should be heard from my aunts. My mother had seemed so well and active, and, with her brilliant color and beautiful blue eyes and chestnut hair which lay in soft waves all over her head, had been so pretty and young and girlish-looking, that it was hard to believe her dead, and the hearts of few girls of fourteen have ever been wrung with such anguish as I felt when, after her funeral, I lay down upon a bed in the rectory and sobbed myself into a disturbed sleep, from which I was roused by the sound of voices in the adjoining room, where a neighbor was talking with Mrs. Wilmot, the rector’s wife, of me and my future.

“Her aunts will have to do something now. They will be ashamed not to. Do you know why they have so persistently ignored Mr. and Mrs. Gerold Morton?”

It was Mrs. Smith, the neighbor, who asked the question, and Mrs. Wilmot replied, “I know but little, as Mrs. Morton was very reticent upon the subject. I think, however, that the aunts were angry because Gerold, who had always lived with them, made what they thought a misalliance by marrying the daughter of the woman with whom he boarded when in college. They had in mind another match for him, and when he disappointed them, they refused to recognize his wife or to see him again.”

“But did he have nothing from his father? I thought the Mortons were very rich,” Mrs. Smith said, and Mrs. Wilmot answered her, “Nothing at all, for his father, too, had married against the wishes of his father, a very hard and strange man, I imagine, who promptly disinherited his son. But when the young wife died at the birth of her child, the aunts took the little boy Gerold and brought him up as their own. I do not at all understand it, but I believe the Morton estate is held by a long lease and will eventually pass from the family unless some one of them marries somebody in the family of the old man who gave the lease.”

“They seem to be given to misalliances,” Mrs. Smith rejoined; “but if they could have seen Gerold’s wife they must have loved her, she was so sweet and pretty. Doris is like her. She will be a beautiful woman, and her face alone should commend her to her aunts.”

No girl of fourteen can hear unmoved that she is lovely, and, although I was hot with indignation at my aunts for their treatment of my father and their contempt for my mother, I was conscious of a stir of gratification, and as I went to the washstand to bathe my burning forehead I glanced at myself in the mirror. My face was swollen with weeping, and my eyes were very red, with dark circles around them, but they were like my mother’s, and my hair was like hers, too, and there was an expression about my mouth which brought her back to me. I was like my mother, and I was glad she had left me her heritage of beauty, although I cared but little whether it commended me to my aunts or not, as I meant to keep aloof from them, if possible. I could take care of myself, I thought, and any hardship would be preferable to living with them, even should they wish to have me do so, which was doubtful.

To Mrs. Wilmot I said nothing of what I had overheard, but waited in some anxiety for Aunt Kizzy’s letter, which came about two weeks after my mother’s death. It was directed to Mr. Wilmot, and was as follows:

“Morton Park, September 10, 18—.

“Rev. J. S. Wilmot:

“Dear Sir,—Your letter is received, and I have delayed my reply until we could give our careful consideration as to what to do, or rather how to do it. We have, of course, no option in the matter as to what to do, for naturally we must care for Gerold’s daughter, but we shall do it in the way most agreeable to ourselves. As you will have inferred, we are all elderly people, and I am old. I shall be sixty next January. Miss Desire, my sister, is forty-seven. (Between her and myself there were two boys who died in infancy.) Maria, my second sister, would, if living, be forty-five, and Beriah is nearly thirty-eight. Thus, you see, we are no longer young, but are just quiet people, with our habits too firmly fixed to have them broken in upon by a girl who probably talks slang and would fill the house with noise and chatter, singing at most inopportune moments, banging the doors, pulling the books from the shelves and the chairs into the middle of the rooms, and upsetting things generally. No, we couldn’t bear it, and just the thought of it has given me a chill.

“We expect to educate the girl,—Doris, I think you called her,—but it must be at the North. If there is a good school in Meadowbrook, perhaps it will be well for her to remain there for a while, and if you choose to retain her in your family you will be suitably remunerated for all the expense and trouble. When she is older I shall place her in some institution where she will receive a thorough education, besides learning the customs of good society. After that we may bring her to Morton Park. For the present, however, I prefer that she should remain with you, for, as you are a clergyman, you will attend to her moral training and see that she is staunch and true in every respect. I hate deception of all kinds, and I wish her to learn the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments and the Creed, and to be confirmed at the proper age. She is about ten now, is she not?

“Enclosed you will find a check sufficient, I think, for the present necessities. If more is needed, it will be sent. Please let me know if there is a good school in Meadowbrook, and if there is none, will you kindly recommend one which you think suitable?

“Yours truly,

“Miss Keziah Morton.”

This was the letter which I read, looking over Mr. Wilmot’s shoulder, and growing more and more angry as I read, it was so heartless and cold, with no word of real interest or sympathy for me, who was merely a burden which must be carried, whether she were willing or not.

“I’ll never accept a penny from her,” I exclaimed, “and you may tell her so. I’d rather scrub than be dependent upon these proud relatives, who evidently think me a heathen. The Lords Prayer, indeed! and I fourteen years old! I wonder if she thinks I know how to read!”

I was very defiant and determined, but after a little I grew calmer, and as the graded school in Meadowbrook, which I had always attended, was excellent of its kind, and the Wilmots were glad to have me with them, I consented at last that a letter to that effect should be forwarded to Kentucky. But when Mr. Wilmot suggested that I, too, should write and thank my aunt for her kindness, I stoutly refused. I was not thankful, I said, neither did I think her kind as I understood kindness, and I could not tell a lie. Later, however, it occurred to me that as she had said she wished me to be true and staunch, and that she hated deception, it might be well to let her know just how I felt towards her, so as not to occupy a false position in the future. Accordingly I wrote a letter, of which the following is a copy:

“Meadowbrook, Mass., September—, 18—.

“Miss Keziah Morton:

“Dear Madam,—Mr. Wilmot has told you that there is a good school in Meadowbrook and that he is glad to keep me in his family. He wished me also to thank you for your kindness in furnishing the means for my education, and if I really felt thankful I would do so. But I don’t, and I cannot pretend to be grateful, for I do not think your offer was made in kindness, but because, as you said in your letter, you had no option except to care for me. You said, too, that you did not like deception of any kind, and I think I’d better tell you how I feel about accepting help from you. Since my mother died I have accidentally heard how you treated her and neglected my father because of her, and naturally I am indignant, for a sweeter, lovelier woman than my mother never lived. When she died and left me alone, there was a leaning in my heart towards you and the other aunts, because you were the only relatives I have in the world, and if you had shown the least sympathy for me I could have loved you so much. But in your letter you never said one word of pity or comfort. You offered to educate me, that was all. But I prefer to care for myself, and I can do it, too. I am fourteen, and can earn my own living. I can make dresses, as mother did after father died, or I can do second work until I have enough to pay for my schooling. And I would rather do it than be indebted to any one, and if, when you get this, you think best to change your mind, I shall be glad. But if you do not, I shall try to improve every moment and get a thorough education as soon as possible, and when I can I shall pay you every dollar you expend for me, and you need have no fears that I shall ever disgrace my father’s name, or you either.

“I used to think that I should like to see Morton Park, as it was once my father’s home, but since reading your letter I have no desire to go there and bang doors, and pull the books from the shelves, and sing, whether invited to or not, and shock you with slang. I suppose I do use some,—all the girls do, and example is contagious,—and I am fond of singing, and would like nothing better than to take lessons in vocal and instrumental music, but I am not quite a heathen, and can hardly remember when I did not know the Lord’s Prayer, and Ten Commandments, and Creed. But I have not been confirmed, and do not intend to be until I am a great deal better than I am now, for I believe there is something necessary to confirmation besides mere intellectual knowledge. Father and mother taught me that, and they were true Christians.

“Father used sometimes to tell me of his home and his aunts, who were kind to him, and so, perhaps, you would like to know how peacefully he died, and how handsome he was in his coffin, just as if he were asleep. But mother was lovelier still, with such a sweet smile on her face, and her dear little hands folded upon her bosom. There were needle-pricks and marks of the hard work she had done on her fingers, but I covered them with great bunches of the white pond-lilies she loved so much, and then kissed her good-bye forever, with a feeling that my heart was broken; and, oh, it aches so now when I remember that in all the world there is no one who cares for me, or on whom I have any claim.

“I don’t know why I have written this to you, who, of course, have no interest in it, but guess I did it because I am sure you once loved father a little. I do not expect you to love me, but if I can ever be of any service to you I will, for father’s sake; and something tells me that in the future, I don’t know when or how, I shall bring you some good. Until then adieu.

“Doris Morton.”

I knew this was not the kind of letter which a girl of fourteen should send to a woman of sixty, but I was indignant and hot-headed and young, and felt that in some way I was avenging my mother’s wrongs, and so the letter was sent, unknown to the Wilmots, and I waited anxiously for the result. But there was none, so far as I knew. Aunt Kizzy did not answer it, and in her letter to Mr. Wilmot she made no reference to it. She merely said she was glad I was to live in a clergyman’s family under religious influence, and added that if I had a good voice and he thought it desirable I was to have instruction in both vocal and instrumental music.

It did not occur to me to connect this with anything I had written, but I was very glad, for I was passionately fond of music, as I was of books generally. And so for two years I was a pupil in the High School in Meadowbrook, passing from one grade to another, until at last I was graduated with all the honors which such an institution could give.

During this time not a word had ever been written to me by my aunts. The bills had been regularly paid through Mr. Wilmot, to whom Aunt Kizzy’s letters were addressed, and at the end of every quarter a report of my standing in scholarship and deportment had been forwarded to Kentucky. And that was all I knew of my relatives, who might have been Kamschatkans for anything they were to me.

About six months before I was graduated, Mr. Wilmot was told that I was to be sent to Madame De Moisiere’s School in Boston, and then, three months later, without any reason for the change, I learned that I was to go to Wellesley, provided I could pass the necessary examination. Of this I had no fears, but the change disappointed me greatly, as I had heard glowing accounts of Madame De Moisiere’s School from a girl friend who had been there, and at first I rebelled against Wellesley, which I fancied meant nothing but hard study, with little recreation. But there was no help for it. Aunt Keziah’s law was the law of the Medes and Persians, and one morning in September I said good-bye to Meadowbrook and started for Wellesley, which seemed to me then a kind of intellectual prison.

CHAPTER II.—Beriah’s story.
DORIS.

Morton Park, June —, 18—.

Ten o’clock at night, and I have brought out my old book for a little chat. I am sure I don’t know why I continue to write in my journal, when I am nearly forty years old, unless it is because I began it nineteen years ago, on the day after I said good-bye to Tom forever and felt that my heart was broken. It was just such a moonlight night as this when we walked under the elms in the Park and he told me I was a coward, because I would not brave Kizzy’s wrath and marry out of the “accursed Hepburn line,” as he called it. Well, I was afraid of Kizzy, and shrank from all the bitterness and trouble which has come to us through that Hepburn line. First, there was my brother Douglas, twenty-five years older than I am, who, because he married the girl he loved, instead of the one he didn’t, was sent adrift without a dollar. Why didn’t my father, I wonder, marry into the line himself, and so save all this trouble? Probably because he was so far removed from the crisis now so fast approaching, that he ventured to take my mother, to whom he was always tender and loving, showing that there was kindness in his nature, although he could be so hard on Douglas and the dear little wife who died when Gerold was born. Then came the terrible time when both my father and mother were swept away on the same day by the cholera, and six months after Douglas died, and his boy Gerold came to live with us, He was two years my senior, and more like my brother than my nephew, and I loved him dearly and spoke up for him when Kizzy turned him out, just as Douglas had been turned out before him. Had I dared I would have written to him and assured him of my love, but I could not, so great was my dread of Keziah, who exercises a kind of hypnotic power over us all. She tried to keep Desire from the man of her choice, and might have succeeded, if death had not forestalled her. She sent Tom away from me, and only yielded to Maria, who had a will as strong as her own and married whom she pleased. But she, too, died just after her husband, who was shot in the battle of Fredericksburgh, and we have no one left but her boy Grant, who is almost as dear to me as Gerold was.

Grant is a young man now, and I trust he will marry Dorothea, and so break the evil spell which that old man must have put upon us when to the long lease of ninety years given to my grandfather he tacked that strange condition that if before the expiration of the lease a direct heir of Joseph Morton, of Woodford County, Kentucky, married a direct heir of Amos Hepburn, of Keswick, England, only half the value of the property leased should revert to the Hepburn heir, while the other half should remain in the Morton family. If no such marriage has taken place, uniting the houses of Morton and Hepburn, then the entire property goes to the direct heir of the Hepburns. I believe I have stated it as it is worded in that old yellow document which Keziah keeps in the family Bible and reads every day with a growing dread of what will soon befall us unless Grant marries Dorothea, who, so far as we know, stands first in the Hepburn line, and to whom the Morton estate will go if it passes from our hands.

I have sometimes doubted if that clause would stand the test of law, and have said so to Keziah, suggesting to her to take advice on the subject. But she treated my suggestion with scorn, charging me with wishing to be dishonest, and saying that even if it were illegal it was the request of Amos Hepburn, and father had instilled it into her mind that a dead man’s wish was law, and she should abide by it. Neither would she allow me to ask any legal advice, or talk about the matter to any one.

“It is our own business,” she said, “and if we choose to give up our home it concerns no one but ourselves.”

But she does not expect to give it up, for our hopes are centred on Grant’s marrying Dorothea; and as one means of accomplishing this end he must be kept from Doris and all knowledge of her.

Poor little orphaned Doris! I wonder what she is like, and why Keziah is so hard upon her! She is not to blame because her father married the daughter of his landlady, whom Keziah calls a cook. How well I recall a morning two or three years ago when, at the tick of the clock announcing eight, Kizzy and Dizzy and I marched solemnly down to breakfast just as we have done for the last twenty years and shall for twenty more if we live so long, Keziah first in her black dress and lace cap, with her keys jingling at her side, Desire next, in her white gown and blue ribbons, which she will wear until she is seventy, and I, in my chintz wrapper of lavender and white, colors which Tom said were becoming to me and which I usually select. I can hear the swish of our skirts on the stairs, and see the round table with its china and glass and flowers, and old Abe, the butler, bringing in the coffee and toast, and a letter for Keziah, who read it twice, and then, folding it very deliberately, said, “Gerold’s widow is dead and has left a little girl, and a Rev. Mr. Wilmot has written to know what is to be done with her.”

“Oh, bring her here, by all means!” both Dizzy and I exclaimed in a breath, while Keziah’s face, which is always severe and stern, grew more so as she replied, in the tone from which there is no appeal, “She will stay where she is, if there is a decent school there. I shall educate her, of course; there is no alternative; but she cannot come here until she is sufficiently cultivated not to mortify us with her bad manners, as blood will tell. I have never forgiven her mother for marrying Gerold, and I cannot yet forgive this girl for being that woman’s daughter.”

Both Desire and myself knew how useless it was to combat Keziah when her mind was made up. So we said nothing more about the child, and kept as much as possible out of Keziah’s way, for when she is disturbed she is not a pleasant person to meet in a tete-a-tete. We knew she wrote to Mr. Wilmot, and that he replied, and then, two days after, when we went down to breakfast, we found another letter for Keziah. It was from Doris, and Keziah read it aloud, while her voice and hands shook with wrath, and Desire and I exchanged glances of satisfaction and touched each other slyly with our feet in token of sympathy with the child, who dared write thus to one who had ruled us so long that we submitted to her now without a protest. It was a very saucy letter, but it showed the mettle of the girl, and I respected her for it, and my heart went out to her with a great pity when she said, “If you had shown the least sympathy for me I could have loved you so much, but you did not. You offered to care for me because you felt that you must, but you never sent me one word of pity or comfort.”

“Oh, Keziah,” I exclaimed at this point, “is that true? Did you write to Mr. Wilmot and say no word to the child?”

“I never say what I do not feel,” was Keziah’s answer, as she read on, and when she had finished the letter she added, “She is an ungrateful girl, fitter for a dressmaker or maid, no doubt, than for anything higher. But she is a Morton, and must not be suffered to do a menial’s work. I shall educate her in my own way, but shall not recognize her socially until I know the kind of woman into which she develops. Neither must you waste any sentimentality upon her, or make any advances in the shape of letters, for I will not have it. Let her stand alone awhile. She seems to be equal to it. And——” here she hesitated, while her pale cheek flushed a little, as she continued, “she is older than I supposed. She is fourteen,—very pretty, or beautiful, I think Mr. Wilmot said, and that does not commend her to me. You know how susceptible Grant is to beauty, and there must be no more mistakes. The time is too short for that. Grant is going to Andover, which is not far from Meadowbrook, and if he knew of this girl, who is his second cousin, nothing could keep him from seeing her, and there is no telling what complications might arise, for she is undoubtedly designing like her mother, who won Gerold from the woman he should have married. Consequently you are to say nothing to Grant of this girl; then, if he chances to meet her and trouble comes of it, I shall know the hand of fate is in it.”

“But, Keziah,” I remonstrated, “you surely cannot expect that Grant will never know anything of Doris? That is preposterous!”

“He need know nothing of her until matters are arranged between him and Dorothea, who is only fifteen now, while he is eighteen,—both too young as yet for an engagement. But it must be. It shall be!”

She spoke with great energy, and we, who knew her so well, felt sure that it would be, and knew that so far as Grant or any of us were concerned, Doris was to remain a myth until such time as Keziah chose to bring her home. But if we could not speak of her to Grant, Desire and I talked of her often between ourselves, and two or three times I began a letter to her, but always burned it, so great was my fear of Keziah’s displeasure should she find it out. We knew the girl was well cared for and happy, and that she stood high in all her classes, for the very best of reports came regularly from her teachers, both with regard to deportment and to scholarship. Perhaps I am wrong, but I cannot help thinking that Keziah would have been better pleased if some fault had been found in order to confirm her theory that blood will tell. But there has been none, and she was graduated with honor at the High School in Meadowbrook, and every arrangement was made for her to go to Madame De Moisiere’s school in Boston, where she particularly wished to go, when suddenly Keziah changed her mind in favor of Wellesley, where Doris did not wish to go. “She is bitterly disappointed, and I shall be glad if you can think best to adhere to your first plan,” Mr. Wilmot wrote, but did not move Keziah a whit. It was either Wellesley or some out-of-the-way place in Maine, which I do not recall. Doris has chosen Wellesley, of course, while Dizzy and I have put our wits to work to find the cause of the change, and I think we have found it. Dorothea has suddenly made up her mind to go to Madame De Moisiere.

“I don’t care for books, any way,” she wrote. “I am a dunce, and everybody knows it and seems to like me just as well. But old Gardy thinks I ought to go somewhere to be finished, and so I have chosen De Moisiere, where I expect to have no end of fun provided I can hoodwink the teachers, and I think I can. Besides, as you may suspect, the fact that Grant has finished Andover and is now in Harvard has a good deal to do with my choice, for he will call upon me, of course. I shall be so proud of him, as I hear he is very popular, and all the girls will be green with envy!”

“The dear rattle-brained child,” Keziah said, chuckling over the letter, as she would not have chuckled if it had been from Doris,—“the dear rattle-brained child! Of course Grant must call, and I shall write to the professors, giving my permission, and to Madame asking her to allow him to see her.”

Poor, innocent Kizzy! It is so many years since she was at boarding-school, where she was kept behind bars and bolts, and she knows so little how fast the world has moved since then, that she really believes young people are kept as closely now as they were forty years ago. What would she say if she knew how many times Grant was at Madame’s while he was at Andover and during his first year at Harvard, and how many flirtations he has had with the girls, whom he calls a jolly lot. All this he confided to Dizzy and myself, when at the vacation he came home, fresh and breezy and full of fun and frolic and noise, making our quiet house resound with his college songs and Harvard yells, which I think are hideous, and rather fast, if not low. But Kizzy never utters a word of protest, and pays without questioning the enormous bills sent to her, and seems gratified to know that his rooms are as handsome and his turnout as fine as any in Cambridge.

Grant has the first place in Kizzy’s heart, and Dorothea the next, and because she is going to Madame De Moisiere, Doris must not go, for naturally she would fall in with Dorothea, and through her with Grant, who would not be insensible to his pretty cousin’s charms, and who would resent his having been kept from her so long. Mr. Wilmot has written that she is exceedingly beautiful, with a manner which attracts every one, while some of her teachers have written the same. Dorothea, on the contrary, is rather plain. “Ugly as a hedge fence,” Grant once said of her in a fit of pique, declaring that if he ever married, it would be to a pretty face. And so he must not see Doris until he is engaged to Dorothea, as it seems likely he soon will be, and Doris is going to Wellesley, where Kizzy thinks Grant has never been and never can go without her permission! Deluded Kizzy! Grant knows at least a dozen Wellesley girls, each one of whom he designates a brick. Will he find Doris, I wonder? I cannot help hoping so. Ah, well, the world is a queer mixture, and nous verrons.

It is growing late, and everybody in and around the house is asleep, except myself and Nero, the watch-dog, who is fiercely baying the moon or barking at some thieving negro stealing our eggs or chickens. The clock is striking twelve, and I must say good-night to my journal and to Tom, if he is still alive, and to dear little Doris: so leaning from my window into the cool night air, I will kiss my hand to the north and south and east and west, and say God bless them both, wherever they are.

CHAPTER III.—Doris’s Story.
GRANTLEY MONTAGUE AND DOROTHEA.

It was a lovely morning in September when, with Lucy Pierce, a girl friend, I took the train for Boston, where I was to spend the night with Lucy’s aunt, who lived there, and the next day go to Wellesley. Soon after we were seated, a young man who had formerly lived in Meadowbrook, but was now a clerk in some house in Chicago and was going to Boston on business, entered the car, and after the first greetings were over, said to us, “I saw you get in at Meadowbrook, and have come to speak with you and have a little rest. The through sleeper from Chicago and Cincinnati is half full of school-girls and Harvard boys, who have kept up such a row. Why, it was after twelve last night before they gave us a chance to sleep. They are having a concert now, and a girl from Cincinnati, whom they call Thea, and who seems to be the ringleader, is playing the banjo, while another shakes a tambourine, and a tall fellow from Kentucky, whom they call General Grant, is whistling an accompaniment. I rather think Miss Thea is pretty far gone with the general, the way she turns her great black eyes on him, and I wouldn’t wonder if he were a little mashed on her, although she is not what I call pretty. And yet she has a face which one would look at twice, and like it better the second time than the first; and, by Jove, she handles that banjo well. I wish you could see her.”

When we reached Worcester, where we were to stop a few minutes, Lucy and I went into the sleeper, from which many of the passengers had alighted, leaving it free to the girls and the Harvards, who were enjoying themselves to their utmost. The concert was at its height, banjo and tambourine-players and whistler all doing their best, and it must be confessed that the best was very good. Thea was evidently the centre of attraction, as, with her hat off and her curly bangs pushed back from her forehead, her white fingers swept the strings of the banjo with a certain inimitable grace, and her brilliant, laughing eyes looked up to the young man, who was bending over her with his back to me so I could not see his face. I only knew he was tall and broad-shouldered, with light brown hair which curled at the ends, and that his appearance was that of one bred in a city, who has never done anything in his life but enjoy himself. And still he fascinated me almost as much as Thea, who, as I passed her, said to him, with a soft Southern accent, “For shame, Grant,—to make so horrid a discord! I believe you did it on purpose, and I shall not play any more. The concert is ended; pass round the hat;” and, dropping her banjo on her lap and running her fingers through her short hair until it stood up all over her head, she leaned back as if exhausted and fanned herself with her sailor hat. With the exception of her eyes and hair, she was not pretty in the usual acceptation of the term. But, as young Herring had said, one would turn to look at her twice and like her better the second time than the first, for there was an irresistible charm in her manner and smile and voice, which to me seemed better than mere beauty of feature and complexion.

When he reached the depot in Boston I saw her again, and then thought her very pretty as she stood upon the platform, taking her numerous parcels from “General” Grant, with whom she was gayly chattering.

“Now mind you come soon. I shall be so homesick till I see you. I am half homesick now,” she said, brushing a tear, either real or feigned, from her eyes.

“But suppose they won’t let me call? They are awfully stiff when they get their backs up, and they are not very fond of me,” the young man said, and she replied, “Oh, they will, for your aunt and Gardy are going to write and ask permission for me to see you, so that is fixed. Au revoir.” And, kissing her fingers to him, she followed her companions, while Grant went to look for his baggage.

He had been standing with his back to me, but as he turned I saw his face distinctly and started involuntarily with the thought that I had seen him before, or somebody like him. Surely there was something familiar about him, and the memory of my dead father came back to me and was associated with this young man, thoughts of whom clung to me persistently, until the strangeness and novelty of Wellesley drove him and Thea from my mind for a time.

Of my student life at Wellesley, I shall say but little, except that as a student I was contented and happy. I loved study for its own sake, and no task was too long, no lesson too hard, for me to master. I stood high in all my classes, and was popular with my teachers and the few girls whom I chose as my friends. And still there was constantly with me a feeling of unrest,—a longing for something I could not have. Mordecai sat in the gate, and my Mordecai was the restrictions with which my Aunt Keziah hedged me round, not only in a letter written to my teachers, but in one which she sent to me when I had been in Wellesley three or four weeks. I was not expecting it, and at the sight of her handwriting my heart gave a great bound, for she was my blood relation, and although I had no reason to love her, I had more than once found myself wishing for some recognition from her. At last it had come, I thought, and with moist eyes and trembling hands I opened the letter, which was as follows:

“Dear Doris,—It has come to my knowledge that a great deal more license is allowed to young people than in my day, and that young men sometimes call upon or manage to see school-girls without the permission of their parents or guardians. This is very reprehensible, and something I cannot sanction. I am at a great expense for your education, in order that you may do credit to your father’s name, and I wish you to devote your entire energies and thoughts to your books, and on no account to receive calls or attentions of any kind from any one, and especially a Harvard student. My orders are strict in this respect, and I have communicated them to your Principal. You can, if accompanied by a teacher, go occasionally to a concert or a lecture in Boston, but, as a rule you are better in the building, and must have nothing to do with the Harvarders. Your past record is good and I expect your future to be the same, and shall be pleased accordingly. I shall send your quarter’s spending money to Miss ——, who will give it to you as you need it, and I do this because I hear that girls at school are sometimes given to buying candy by the box,—French candy, too,—and sweets by the jar, and to having spreads, whatever these may be. But you can afford none of these extravagancies, and, lest you should be tempted to indulge in them, I have removed the possibility from your way by giving your allowance to Miss ——, and I wish you to keep an account of all your little incidental expenses, and send it to me with the quarterly reports of your standing.

“I have arranged with the Wilmots for you to spend your vacations with them. But when your education is finished, if your record is as good as it has been, you will come to us, of course, if we have a home for you to come to. There is a dark cloud hanging over us, and whether it will burst or not I cannot tell. If it does, you may be obliged to earn your own living, and hence the necessity for you to get a thorough education. I am thankful to say that, for people of our years, your aunts and myself are in comfortable health. If you wish to write me occasionally and tell me of your life at Wellesley, you can do so, but you must not expect prompt replies, as people at my time of life are not given to voluminous correspondence.

“Yours truly,

“Keziah Morton.”

I had opened the letter with eager anticipations of what it might contain, but when I finished it my heart was hardening with a sense of the injustice done me by treating me as if I were a little child, who could not be trusted with my own pocket money, and who was to give an account for every penny spent, from a postage stamp to a car fare. And this at first hurt me worse than the other restrictions. I did not know much about the Harvard boys or spreads, and I did not care especially for French candy and sweets, but now that they were so summarily forbidden, I began to want them and to rebel against the chains which bound me, and as the weeks and months went on, I became more and more conscious of a feeling of desolation and loneliness, which at times made me very unhappy. In Meadowbrook I had been so kindly cared for by the Wilmots that, except for the sense of loss when I thought of my mother, I had not fully realized how alone I was in the world; but at Wellesley, when I heard my companions talk of their homes and saw their delight when letters came to them from father or mother or brothers or sisters, I used to go away and cry with an intense longing for the love of some one of my own kindred and friends. I had no letters from home and no home to go to during the vacations except that of the Wilmots, who always made me welcome. I stood alone, a sort of goody-goody, as the girls called me when I resisted their entreaties to join in violation of the rules. I took no part in what Aunt Keziah called spreads. I seldom saw a Harvard student, but heard a good deal about them and learned that they were not the monsters Aunt Kizzy thought them to be.

My room-mate, Mabel Stearns, had a brother in Harvard, whose intimate friend was called General Grant, but whose real name was Grantley Montague, Mabel said, adding that he was a Kentuckian and belonged to a very aristocratic family. He was reported to be rich, spending his money freely, and while always managing to have his lessons and stand well with the professors, still arranging to have a hand in every bit of fun and frolic that came in his way. I heard, too, of Dorothea Haynes, who was at Madame De Mosiere’s, She was a great heiress and an orphan, and lived in Cincinnati with her guardian, whom she called old Gardy, who gave her all the money she wanted, and whose instructions were that, as she was delicate, she was not to have too many lessons or study too hard. Like Grantley Montague, she was very popular, and no one had so many callers from Harvard. Prominent among these was Grantley Montague, who was very lover-like in his attentions. Happy Dorothea Haynes, I thought, envying her for her money,—which was not doled out to her in quarters and halves,—envying her for her freedom, and envying her most for her acquaintance with Grantley Montague, who occupied much of my thoughts, but who seemed as far removed from me as the planets from the earth.

I never went anywhere, except occasionally to a concert, or a lecture, and to church. I seldom saw anyone except the teachers and students around me, and, although I was very fond of my books, time dragged rather monotonously with me until I had been at Wellesley about two and a half years, when Mabel who had spent Sunday in Boston came back on Monday radiant and full of news which she hastened to communicate. Grantley Montague and her brother Fred were soon to give a tea-party under the auspices of her married sister, who lived in Cambridge, and who was to be assisted by two or three other ladies. I had heard of these receptions, where Thea Haynes usually figured so prominently in wonderful costumes, but if any wish that I might have part in them ever entered my mind, it was quickly smothered, for such things were not for me, fettered as I was by my aunt Keziah’s orders, which were not relaxed in the least, although I was now nineteen years of age. How then was I surprised and delighted when with Mabel’s invitation there came one for me! It was through her influence, I knew, but I was invited, and for a few moments I was happier than I had ever been in my life. Then came the thought expressed in words, “Can I go?”

“Certainly,” Mabel said; “you have only to write your aunt, who will say yes at once, if you tell her how much you desire it, and Miss —— will give her permission gladly, for you are the model scholar. You never get into scrapes, and have scarcely had an outing except a few stupid lectures or concerts with a teacher tacked on, and I don’t believe you have spoken to a Harvarder since you have been here. Of course she will let you go; if she don’t, she’s an old she-dragon. Write to her at once, and blarney her a little, if necessary.”

I did not know how to blarney, and I was horribly afraid of the she-dragon, as Mabel called her, but I wrote her that day, telling her what I wanted, and how much pleasure it would give me to go. It was the first favor I had asked, I said, and I had tried so hard to do what I thought would please her, that I hoped she would grant it, and, as there was not very much time for delay, would she please telegraph her answer? I signed myself, “Your affectionate niece, Doris Morton,” and then waited, anxiously, for a reply. I knew about how long it took for a letter to reach Morton Park, and on the fourth day after mine was sent I grew so nervous that I could scarcely eat or keep my mind upon my lessons. Encouraged by Mabel, I had come to think it quite sure that my aunt would consent, and had tried on my two evening dresses to see which was the more becoming to me, crimson surah with creamy trimmings, or cream-colored cashmere with crimson trimmings. Mabel decided for the cashmere, which, she said, softened my brilliant color, and I sewed a bit of lace into the neck and fastened a bow of ribbon a little more securely, and was smoothing the folds of the dress and wondering what Grantley Montague would think of it and me, when there was a knock at my door and a telegram was handed me. I think the sight of one of those yellow missives quickens the pulse of every one, and for a moment my heart beat so fast that I could scarcely stand. I was alone, for Mabel had gone out, and, dropping into a chair, I opened the envelope with hands which shook as if I were in a chill. Then everything swam before my eyes and grew misty, except the one word No, which stamped itself upon my brain so indelibly that I see it now as distinctly as I saw it then, and I feel again the pang of disappointment and the sensation as if my heart were beating in my throat and choking me to death. I remember trying to cry, with a thought that tears might remove the pressure in my head, which was like a band of steel. But I could not, and for a few moments I sat staring at the word No, which for a time turned me into stone. Then I arose and hung up the dress I was not to wear, and put away the long gloves I had bought to go with it, and was standing by the window, looking drearily out upon the wintry sky, when Mabel came in, full of excitement and loaded with parcels.

She had been shopping in Boston, and she displayed one after another the slippers and fan and handkerchief she had bought for the great occasion of which she had heard so much. Grantley Montague, she said, was sparing no pains to make it the very finest affair of the season, and Thea Haynes was having a wonderful costume made, although she already had a dozen Paris gowns in her wardrobe. Then, as I did not enter very heartily into her talk, she suddenly stopped, and, looking me in the face, exclaimed, “What is it, Dorey? Has the answer come?”

I nodded, and spying the dispatch on the table, she snatched it up and read No, and then began pirouetting wildly around the room, with exclamations not very complimentary to my aunt.

“The vile old cat!” she said. “What does she mean by treating you so, and you the model who never do anything out of the way, and have never been known to join in the least bit of a lark? But I would spite the hateful old woman. I’d be bad if I were you. Suppose you jump out of the window to-night, or do something to assert your rights. Will you? A lot of us will help.”

She had expressed aloud much that had passed through my mind during the last hour. What was the use of being a goody-goody, as I was so often called? Why not be a bady-bady and taste forbidden fruit for once? I had asked myself, half resolving to throw off all restraint and see how bad I could be. But when I thought of my teachers, who trusted me and whom I loved, and more than all when I remembered my dead mother’s words, “If your aunts care for you, respect their wishes as you would mine,” my mood changed. I would do right whatever came; and I said so to Mabel, who called me a milksop and sundry other names equally expressive, and declared she would not tell me a thing about the reception. But I knew she would, and she did, and for days after it I heard of little else than the perfectly elegant affair.

“Such beautiful rooms,” she said, “with so many pictures, and among them such a funny one of four old women sitting in a row, like owls on a pole, with a moon-faced baby in the lap of one of them, and a young man behind them. It has a magnificent frame, and I meant to have asked its history, but forgot it, there was so much else to look at.”

I wonder now that I did not think of my father’s picture of his four aunts, which was sold to a Boston dealer years before; but I did not, and Mabel rattled on, telling me of the guests, and the dresses, especially that of Thea Haynes, which she did not like; it was too low in front and too low in the back, and fitted her form too closely, and the sleeves were too short for her thin arms.

“But then it was all right because it was Thea Haynes, and she is very nice and agreeable and striking, with winning manners and a sweet voice,” she said. “Everybody was ready to bow down to her, except Grantley Montague, who was just as polite to one as to another, and who sometimes seemed annoyed at the way she monopolized him, as if he were her special property. I am so sorry you were not there, as you would have thrown her quite in the shade, for you are a thousand times handsomer than she.”

This was of course flattering to my vanity, but it did not remove the feeling of disappointment, which lasted for a long time and was not greatly lessened when about a week after the reception I received from Aunt Keziah a letter which I knew was meant to be conciliatory. She was sorry, she said, to have to refuse the first favor I had ever asked, but she had good reasons, which she might some time see fit to tell me, and then she referred again to a shadow which was hanging over the family, and which made her morbid, she supposed. I had no idea what the shadow was, or what connection it had with my going to Grantley Montague’s reception, but I was glad she was making even a slight apology for what seemed to me so unjust. She was much pleased with the good reports of me, she said, and if I liked I might attend a famous opera which she heard was soon to be in Boston, and I could have one of those long wraps trimmed with fur such as young girls wore to evening entertainments, and a new silk dress, if I needed it. That was very kind, and Mabel, to whom I showed the letter, declared that the dragon must have met with a change of heart.

“I’d go to the opera,” she said, “and I’d have the wrap trimmed with light fur, and the gown a grayish blue, just the color of your eyes when you are excited. There are some lovely patterns at Jordan & Marsh’s, and sister Clara will help you pick it out, and we’ll have a box and go with Clara, and I’ll do your hair beautifully, and you’ll see how many glasses will be leveled at you.”

Mabel was always comforting and enthusiastic, and I began to feel a good deal of interest in the box and the dress and the wrap and the opera, which I enjoyed immensely, and where so many glasses were turned towards me that my cheeks burned as if I were a culprit caught in some wrong act. But there was something lacking, and that was Grantley Montague, whom I fully expected to see. Neither he nor Thea was there, and I heard afterwards that she was ill with a cold and had written a pathetic note, begging him not to go and enjoy himself when she was feeling so badly and crying on her pillow, with her nose a sight to behold. Mabel’s brother, who reported this to her, added that when Grantley read the note he gave a mild little swear and said he reckoned he should go if he liked. But he didn’t, and I neither saw him then, nor any time afterwards, except in the distance, during my stay at Wellesley.

He was graduated the next summer, and left for Kentucky, with the reputation of a fair scholar and a first-rate fellow who had spent quite a fortune during his college course. Thea Haynes also left Madame’s, where she said she had learned nothing, generously adding, however, that it was not the fault of her teachers, but because she didn’t try. Some time during the next autumn I heard that she had gone to Europe with her guardian and maid and a middle-aged governess who acted as chaperon, and that Grantley Montague was soon to join her in a trip to Egypt. After that I knew no more of them except as Mabel occasionally told me what she heard from her brother, who had also left Harvard and was in San Francisco. To him Grantley wrote in February that he was with the Haynes party, which had been increased by a second or third cousin of Thea’s, a certain Aleck Grady, who was a crank, and perfectly daft on the subject of a family tree and the missing link in the Hepburn line.

“If he finds the missing link,” Fred wrote to his sister, “Grant says it will take quite a fortune from Thea, or himself, or both; and he seems to be a little anxious about the link which Aleck Grady is trying to find. I don’t know what it means. Think I’ll ask him to explain more definitely when I write him again.”

Neither Mabel nor I could hazard a guess with regard to the missing link or the Hepburn line, and I soon forgot them entirely in the excitement of preparing for my graduation, which was not very far away. I had hoped that one of my aunts at least would be present, and had written to that effect to Aunt Keziah, telling her how lonely it would be for me with no relative present, and how earnestly I wished that either she or Aunt Desire or Aunt Beriah would come. I even went so far as to thank her for all she had done for me and to tell her how sorry I was for the saucy letter I wrote to her six years ago. I had often wanted to do this, but had never quite made up my mind to it until now, when I hoped it might bring me a favorable response. But I was mistaken.

It was not possible for herself or either of her sisters to come so far, she wrote. She appreciated my wish to have her there, she said, and did not esteem me less for it. But it could not be. She enclosed money for my graduating dress, and also for my traveling expenses, for after a brief rest in Meadowbrook I was going to Morton Park, in charge of a merchant from Frankfort, who would be in New York in July and would meet me in Albany. And so, with no relative present to encourage me or be proud of me, I received my diploma and more flowers than I knew what to do with, and compliments enough to turn my head, and then, amid tears and kisses and good wishes, bade farewell to my girl friends and teachers, one of whom said to me at parting: “If all our pupils were like you, Wellesley would be a Paradise.”

A model in every respect they called me, and it was with quite a high opinion of myself that I went to Meadowbrook, where I spent a week, and then, bidding a tearful good-bye to the friends who had been so kind to me, I joined Mr. Jones at Albany, and was soon on my way to Kentucky.

CHAPTER IV.—Grantley Montague’s Story.
ALECK AND THEA.

Hotel Chapman, Florence, April —, 18—.

Nearly everybody keeps a diary at some time in his life, I think. Aunt Brier does, I know, and Thea, and Aleck,—confound him, with his Hepburn lines and missing links!—and so I may as well be in fashion and commence one, even if I tear it up, as I probably shall. Well, here we are in Florence, and likely to be until Thea is able to travel. Why did she go tearing around Rome night and day in all sorts of weather, spooning it in the Coliseum by moonlight and declaring she was oh, so hot, when my teeth were chattering with cold, and I could see nothing in the beauty she raved about but some old broken walls and arches, with shadows here and there, which did not look half as pretty as the shadows in the park at home? Europe hasn’t panned out exactly as I thought it would, and I am getting confoundedly bored. Thea is nice, of course,—too nice, in fact,—but a fellow does not want to be compelled to marry a girl any way. He’d rather have some choice in the matter, which I haven’t had; but I like Thea immensely, and we are engaged.

There, I’ve blurted it out, and it looks first-rate on paper, too. Yes, we are engaged, and this is how it happened. Ever since I was knee-high Aunt Keziah has dinged it into me that I must marry Thea, or her heart would be broken, and the Mortons beggared. I wish old Amos Hepburn’s hand had been paralyzed before he added to that long lease a condition which has brought grief to my Uncle Douglas and cousin Gerold, who married an actress, or a cook, or something, because he loved her more than he did money. By George, I respect him for his independence, and wish I were more like him, and not a lazy, good-for-nothing fellow who does not know how to do a single useful thing or to earn a dollar.

Well, the time is drawing near for that lease to expire, and unless a direct heir of Joseph Morton, my great-grandfather, marries a direct heir of Amos Hepburn, the entire Morton estate will revert to the Hepburn heir. Now, I am a direct heir of Joseph Morton, and Thea is old Hepburn’s direct heir, which means, according to the way it was explained in the lease, that she is the eldest child, whether son or daughter, of the eldest child, and so on back to the beginning, when there were three daughters of old Amos. Thea comes from the second of these daughters, for where the first one is the Lord only knows. Aleck Grady descends from old Amos’s third daughter, and has no chance while Thea lives. Nor does he pretend to want any, as he has money enough of his own. He joined our party uninvited in Egypt, and has bored us to death with his family tree, and the missing link, which link means the eldest daughter of old Hepburn, of whom nothing is known after a certain date. And it is she and her descendants, if there are any, he is trying to hunt up. He is a shrewd fellow, and a kind of quack lawyer, too, and once told me that he did not think the long lease would hold water a minute in the United States, and asked if Aunt Keziah had consulted a first-class lawyer, and when I told him that she had not,—that it had been a rule in our family not to talk about the lease to any one until compelled to do so, and that even if she knew the document was invalid she would consider herself bound in honor to respect it as her father had done before her and enjoined her to do,—he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Chacun à son goût; but I should dispute that lease inch by inch, and beat the Hepburns too.”

“Why, then,” I asked, “are you so anxious to find the missing link, as you call it? I always supposed that for some reason you wanted to throw Thea out of the property.”

With that insinuating smile of his which Thea thinks so winning and I think so disgusting, he replied, “My dear fellow, how you mistake me! I don’t care a picayune who gets the Morton money, if you are fools enough to give it up. But I do care for my ancestors; in fact, I have a real affection for my great-aunt Octavia, and am most anxious to know what became of her and her progeny. I have her as far as New York, where all trace of her is lost. Would you like to see the family tree?”

As I had seen it half a dozen times and knew exactly where Octavia failed to connect, I declined, and then the conversation turned upon Thea, who, Aleck said, was a very nice girl, but a little too fast, and had about her too much gush and too much powder to suit him. It was strange why girls would gush and giggle and plaster their faces with cosmetics and blacken their eyebrows until they looked like women of the town, he said, appealing to me for confirmation of his opinion. I had more than half suspected him of designs on Thea, and I flamed up at once in her defense, telling him she neither gushed, nor powdered, nor blackened,—three lies, as I knew,—but I was angry, and when, with that imperturbable good humor which never fails him, he continued: “Don’t get so mad, I beg. I am older than you, and know human nature better than you do, and I know you pretty well. Why, I’ve made you quite a study. Thea, in spite of her powder and gush, is a splendid girl, and will make a good wife to the man she loves and who loves her, but she is not your ideal, and pardon me for suggesting that I don’t believe that you would marry her if it were not for that clause about the eldest heir, which I don’t think is worth the paper it is written on,”—I could have knocked him down, he was so cool and patronizing, and was also telling me a good deal of truth. But I would not admit it, and insisted that I would marry Thea if there had never been any Hepburn line and she had not a dollar in the world.

“Why don’t you propose, then, and done with it? She is dying to have you,” he said, and I declared I would, and that night I asked her to be my wife, and I have not regretted it either, although I know she is not my ideal.

But who is my ideal, and where is she, if I have one? I am sure I don’t know, unless it is the owner of a face which I have seen but twice, but which comes back to me over and over again, and which I would not forget if I could, and could not if I would. The first time I saw it was at a concert in Boston, not long before I left college. I was in the dress-circle, and diagonally to my right was an immense bonnet or hat which hid half the audience from me. Late in the evening it moved, and I saw beyond it a face which has haunted me ever since. It was that of a young and beautiful girl, who I instinctively felt belonged to a type entirely different from the class of girls whom I had known while at Harvard, and who, without being exactly fast in the worst acceptation of the term, had come so near the boundary-line between propriety and impropriety that it was difficult to tell on which side they stood. But this girl was different, with her deep-blue eyes and her wavy hair which I was sure had never come in contact with the hot curling-tongs, as Thea’s does, while her complexion, which reminded me of the roses and lilies in Aunt Keziah’s garden, owed none of its brilliancy to cosmetics, as Aleck says most complexions do. She was real, and inexpressibly lovely, especially when she smiled, as she sometimes did upon the lady who sat beside her, and who might have been her mother, or her chaperone, or some elderly relative. When the concert was over I hurried out, hoping to get near her, but she was lost in the crowd, and I only saw her once again, three weeks later, in an open street-car going in the opposite direction from the one in which I was seated. In her hand she held a paper parcel, which made me think she might possibly be a seamstress or a saleslady, and I spent a great deal of time haunting the establishments in Boston which employed girls as clerks, but I never found her, nor heard of her. She certainly was not at Moisiere’s and I don’t think she was at Wellesley, as I am sure I should have heard of her through Fred, who had a sister there. Once I thought I would tell him about her, but was kept from doing so by a wish to discover her myself, and when discovered to keep her to myself. But I have never seen her since the day she went riding so serenely past me, unconscious of the admiration and strange emotions she was exciting in me. Who was she, I wonder; and shall I ever see her again? It is not likely; and if I do, what can it matter to me, now that I am engaged to Thea?

In her letter of congratulation Aunt Keziah, who was wild with delight, wrote to me that nothing could make her so happy as my marriage with Thea, and that she knew I would keep my promise, no matter whom I might meet, for no one of Morton blood ever proved untrue to the woman he loved. Of course I shall prove true; and who is there to meet, unless it is my Lost Star, as I call her, for whom I believe I am as persistently searching as Aleck is for the missing link, for I never see a group of young American girls that I do not manage to get near enough to see if she is among them, and I never see a head of chestnut-brown hair set on shoulders just as hers was that I don’t follow it until I see the face, which as yet has not been hers. And in this I am not disloyal to Thea, whom I love better than any girl I have ever known, and whom I will make happy, if possible. She has been ill now nearly four weeks, but in a few days we hope to move on to Paris, where we shall stay until June, then go to Switzerland, and some time in the autumn sail for home, and the aunts who have vied with each other in spoiling me and are the dearest aunts in the world, although so unlike each other,—Aunt Keziah, with her iron will but really kind heart, Aunt Dizzy, with her invalid airs and pretty youthful ways which suit her so well in spite of her years, and Aunt Brier, whose name is a misnomer, she is so soft and gentle, with nothing scratchy about her, and who has such a sad, sweet face, with a look in her brown eyes as if she were always waiting or listening for something. I believe she has a history, and that it is in some way connected with that queer chap, Bey Atkins they called him, whose dress was half Oriental and half European, and whom I met at Shepheard’s in Cairo. I first saw him the night after our return from the trip up the Nile. He registered just after I had written the names of our party, at which he looked a long time, and then fairly shadowed me until he had a chance to speak to me alone. It was after dinner, and we were sitting near each other in front of the hotel, when he began to talk to me, and in an inconceivably short space of time had learned who I was, and where I lived, and about my aunts, in whom he seemed so greatly interested, especially Aunt Brier, that I finally asked if he had ever been to Morton Park.

“Yes,” he answered, knocking the ashes from his cigar and leaning back in the bamboo chair in the graceful, lounging way he has,—“yes, years ago I was in Versailles and visited at Morton Park. Your aunt Beriah and I were great friends. Tell her when you go home that you saw Tom Atkins in Cairo, and that he has become a kind of wandering Ishmael and wears a red fez and white flannel suit. Tell her, too—” but here he stopped suddenly, and, rising, went into the street, where his dragoman was holding the white donkey he always rode, sometimes alone and sometimes with a little girl beside him, who called him father.

Of course, then, he is married, and his wife must be an Arab, for the child was certainly of that race, with her great dark eyes and her tawny hair all in a tangle. I meant to ask him about her, but when next day I inquired for him, I was told that he had gone to his home near Alexandria, where, I dare say, there is a host of little Arabs, and a woman with a veil stretched across her nose, whom he calls his wife.

Alas for Aunt Brier if my conjecture is right!

CHAPTER V.—Beriah’s Story.
DORIS AND THE GLORY HOLE.

It is a long time since I have opened my journal, for there is so little to record. Life at Morton Park goes on in the same monotonous routine, with no change except of servants, of which we have had a sufficiency ever since the negroes became “ekels,” as our last importation from Louisville, who rejoiced in the high-sounding name of Helena Maude, informed us they were. Such things make Keziah furious, for she is a regular fire-eater, but I shall admit their equality provided they spare my best bonnet and do not insist upon putting their knives into our butter. Helena Maude is a pretty good girl, and when some of her friends come to the front door and ask if Miss Smithson lives here I tell them yes, and send them round to the cabins and say nothing to Keziah, who for the last few weeks has been wholly absorbed in other matters than colored gentry.

Doris is coming home to-morrow, and just the thought of it makes me so nervous with gladness that I can scarcely write legibly. I think it was a struggle for Keziah to consent to her coming, and she only did so after she heard Grant was engaged to Dorothea. I never saw Keziah as happy as she was upon the receipt of Grant’s letter, for his marriage with Dorothea means keeping our old home, and she allowed Helena Maude to whistle “Marching Through Georgia” as she cleared the table, and did not reprove her. It was soon after this that she announced her intention to bring Doris to Morton Park after her graduation, and that night Dizzy and I held a kind of jubilee in our sitting-room, we were so glad that at last Gerold’s daughter was coming to her father’s old home.

We need young blood here to keep us from stagnating, and although Grantley will be with us in the autumn, and possibly Dorothea, we know what they are, and are anxious for something new and fresh and pretty like Doris. I have a photograph of her, and it stands before me as I write, a picture of a wondrously beautiful young girl, with great earnest eyes confronting mine so steadfastly, and masses of soft, natural curls all over her head after the fashion of the present day. I know they are natural, although Keziah says they are the result of hot tongs, and that she shall stop it at once, for she will not have the gas turned on half the time while the irons are heating. That is Dorothea’s style; but she is in the Hepburn line, and is to marry Grant, which makes a difference.

Doris sent such a nice letter to Keziah, asking pardon for the saucy things she wrote to her years ago, and begging that some one of us would come to see her graduated. How I wanted to go! but Keziah said we could not afford it, as she intended buying a new upright Steinway in place of the old spindle-legged thing on which she used to thrum when a girl. We have heard that Doris is a fine musician, but Keziah will not admit that the piano was bought for her. Dorothea will visit us in the autumn, she says, and she wishes to make it as pleasant as possible for her. Dizzy and I both know what Dorothea’s playing is like, and that it does not matter much whether it is on a Steinway or a tin pan, but we are glad for something modern in our ancient drawing-room, where every article of furniture is nearly as old as I am, and where the new Steinway is now standing with one of Keziah’s shawls thrown over it to keep it from the dust.

For once in our lives Dizzy and I have waged a fierce battle with Keziah, who came off victor as usual. The battle was over Doris’s room, which Keziah thinks is of little consequence. Looking at our house from the outside, one would say it was large enough to accommodate a dozen school-girls; but looks are deceptive, and it seems it can hardly accommodate one. There is a broad piazza in front, and through the centre a long and wide hall, after the fashion of most Southern houses. On the south side of the hall are the drawing-room and sitting-room, with fireplaces in each. On the north side are the dining-room and Keziah’s sleeping-room, where she usually sits and receives her intimate friends. On the floor above are also four rooms,—Dizzy’s and mine, which open together on the north side of the hall, and on the other side Grantley’s, and the guest-room, which has not been occupied in fifteen years, for when Dorothea is here she has always had a cot in my room or Dizzy’s. At the end of the hall is a small room, ten by twelve perhaps, and communicating with the guest-chamber, for which it was originally intended as a dressing-room, but which we use as a store-room for a most heterogeneous mass of rubbish, such as broken chairs and stands and trunks and chests, and old clothes and warming-pans and water-bags and Grantley’s fishing-tackle. The Glory Hole, we call it, though what the name has to do with the room I have no idea. There is a tradition that Gerold, when he first looked into it, exclaimed, “Oh, glory, what a hole!” and hence the name, which clung to it even after it was cleared of its rubbish for him, for he once occupied it when a little boy, and now it is to be his daughter’s.

Dizzy and I pleaded for the large guest-chamber, but Keziah said that was reserved for Dorothea who, as an engaged young lady, was too old to sleep in a cot. And nothing we could say was of any avail to turn her from her purpose. The Glory Hole was good enough for the daughter of a cook, she said, and so the room has been emptied of its contents, and, except that it is so small, it is quite presentable, with its matting and muslin hangings and willow chair and table by the window, under which there is a box of flowers, as one often sees in London. Just where she will put her trunk or hang her dresses I don’t know,—possibly in my closet, which is large enough for us both. She will be here to-morrow afternoon, and Keziah is nearly ill with dread of her coming, and worrying as to what she will be like, and whether she will bring a banjo, and worst of all, if she will want to ride a bicycle! This bicycle-riding is in Kizzy’s mind the most disreputable thing a woman can do, and the sight of a girl on a wheel, or a boy either, for that matter, is like a red flag to a bull, especially since the riders have taken to the sidewalks. She will never turn out, she declares, and I have seen her stand like a rock and face the enemy bearing down upon her, and once she raised her umbrella with a hiss and a shoo, as if she were scaring chickens. I dare say Thea will have one as soon as she lands in America, but for Doris there are no bicycles, or banjoes, or hot irons,—nothing but the Glory Hole. Poor little Doris!

I hope she will be happy with us, and I know I am glad because she is coming. So few have ever come home to make me glad, and the one who could make me the gladdest will never come again, for somewhere in the wide world the sun is shining on his grave, I am sure, or he would come back to me, and I should bid him stay, or rather go with him, whether to the sands of Arabia or to the shores of the Arctic Sea. My hair is growing gray, the bloom has faded from my cheek, and I shall be forty-four my next birthday, and it is twenty-four years since I saw Tom; but a woman’s love at forty-four is just as strong, I think, as a girl’s at twenty, and there is scarcely a night that I do not hear in my dreams the peculiar whistle with which he used to summon me to our trysting-place after Kizzy had forbidden him the house, and I see again his great, dark eyes full of entreaty and love, and hear his voice urging me to do what, if it were to do over again, I would do. That is an oddly-worded sentence; but I am too tired to change it, and will close my journal until after I have seen Doris.

CHAPTER VI.—Doris’s Story.
MORTON PARK.

I have been here four weeks, and begin to feel quite like the daughter of the house, with some exceptions. I am in love with Aunt Beriah, very intimate with Aunt Desire, and not as much in awe of Aunt Keziah as I was at first. It was a lovely afternoon when the coach from Frankfort set me down at the gate to the Morton grounds, where a little, brown-eyed, brown-haired lady was waiting for me. She had one of the sweetest faces I ever saw, and one of the sweetest voices, too, as she came towards me, holding out both her soft white hands, and saying to me, “I am sure you are Doris, and I am your aunt Beriah. Welcome to Morton Park!”

It was not so much what she said as the way she said it, which stirred me so strangely. It was the first word of affection I had heard from my own kin since my mother died, and, taking her hands in mine, I kissed them passionately, and cried like a child. I think she cried a little, too, but am not sure. I only know that she put her arm around my neck and said, soothingly, “There, there, dear. Don’t cry, when I am so glad.”

Then taking my bag and umbrella, she gave them to a colored girl, whom she called Vine, and who, after bobbing me a courtesy, disappeared through the gateway.

“It is not far, and I thought you would like to walk,” Aunt Brier said, leading the way, while I followed her into the park, at the rear of which stood the house, with its white walls and Corinthian pillars, looking so cool and pleasant in the midst of grass and flowers and maples and elms, with an immense hawthorn-tree in full bloom.

“Oh, this is lovely, and just as papa told me it was,” I exclaimed, and then, stopping short, Aunt Brier drew me close to her, and scrutinizing me earnestly, said, with a tremor in her voice, “Yes, Gerold told you of his old home. I was so fond of him. We were like brother and sister, and I was so sorry when he died. You are not as much like him as I fancied you were from your photograph.”

“No?” I said, interrogatively, wondering if she were disappointed in me; but she soon set me right on that point by saying, “Gerold was good-looking, but you are beautiful.”

I had been told that so often, and I knew it so well without being told, that I did not feel at all elated. I was only glad that she liked my looks, and replied, “And you are lovely, and so young, too. My great aunt ought to look older.”

She smiled at that, and said, “I am nearly forty-four, and feel sometimes as if I were a hundred. But there is Kizzy on the piazza. I think we’d better hurry. She does not like to wait for anything.”

I had never really known what fear of any person was, but I felt it now, and my heart beat violently as I hastened my steps towards the spot where Aunt Keziah stood, stiff and tall and straight, and looking very imposing in her black silk gown and lace cap set on a smooth band of false hair, a bunch of keys dangling at her belt, and a dainty hemstitched handkerchief clasped in her hands. In spite of her sixty odd years, she was a handsome woman to look at, with her shoulders thrown back and her chin in the air as if she were on the alert and the defensive. Her features were clearly cut, her face smooth and pale, while her bright black eyes seemed to look me through as they traveled rapidly from my hat to my boots and back again, evidently taking in every detail of my dress, and resting finally on my face with what seemed to be disapproval.

“How do you do, Miss Doris?” she said, with a quick shutting together of her thin lips, and without the shadow of a smile.

I had cried when Aunt Brier spoke to me, but I did not want to cry now, for something of the woman’s nature must have communicated itself to mine and frozen me into a figure as hard and stiff as she was. It was a trick of mine to imitate any motion or gesture which struck me forcibly, and I involuntarily threw my shoulders back and my chin in the air, and gave her two fingers just as she had given me, and told her I was quite well, and hoped she was the same. For a moment she looked at me curiously, while it seemed to me that her features did relax a little as she asked if I were not very tired with the journey and the dusty ride in the coach from Frankfort.

“It always upsets me,” she said, suggesting that I go at once to my room and rest until dinner, which would be served sharp at six, “and,” she added, “we never wait for meals; breakfast at half-past seven in the summer, lunch at half-past twelve, dinner at six.”

Then she made a stately bow, and I felt that I was dismissed from her presence, and started to follow Aunt Beriah into the hall just as two negroes came up the walk bringing one of my trunks, which had been deposited at the entrance to the park.

“Mass’r Hinton’s man done fotchin’ t’other trunk on his barrer,” the taller negro said, in response to a look of inquiry he must have seen on my face, and instantly Aunt Kizzy’s lips came together just as they had done when she said, “How do you do, Miss Doris?”

“Two trunks?” she asked, in a tone which told me that I had brought altogether too much luggage.

“Yes,” I replied, stopping until the negroes came up the steps. “Perhaps I ought to have brought but one, but I have so many books and things, and, besides, one trunk was father’s and one mother’s, and I could not give either up. This was father’s, which he said you gave him when he went to college. See, here is his name.” And I pointed to “Gerald Morton, Versailles, Ky.,” on the end of the stout leather trunk, which had withstood the wear of years.

“Yes, I remember it,” she said, in a voice so changed and with so different an expression on her face that I scarcely knew her as she bent over the trunk, which she touched caressingly with her hand. “You have kept it well,” she continued; then, to the negroes, “Take it up-stairs, and mind you don’t mar the wall nor the banisters. Look sharp, now.”

“Mass’r Hinton’s man” had arrived with the wheelbarrow and the other trunk, a huge Saratoga, with mother’s name upon it, “Doris Morton, New Haven, Ct.,” but this Aunt Keziah did not touch. Indeed, it seemed to me that she recoiled from it, and there was an added severity in her tone as she told the man to be careful, and chided him for cutting up the gravel with the wheelbarrow.

“I’s couldn’t tote it, missis; it’s too heavy,” he said, as he waited for one of the other blacks to help him take it up the stairs.

I had reached the upper hall and was standing by the door of my room, while Aunt Beriah said, apologetically, “I am sorry it is so small: perhaps we can change it bye-and-bye.”

It was really a very pretty room, but quite too small for my trunks unless I moved out either the bedstead, or the bureau, or the washstand, and, as I could not well dispense with either of these, I looked rather ruefully at my aunt, who said, “There is a big closet in my room where you can hang your dresses and put both your trunks when they are unpacked.” And that was where I did put them, but not until after two days, for I awoke the next morning with the worst headache I ever had in my life, and which, I suppose, was induced by the long and rapid journey from Meadowbrook, added to homesickness and crying myself to sleep. I could not even sit up, and was compelled to keep my room, where Aunt Beriah nursed me so tenderly and lovingly, while Aunt Kizzy came three times a day to ask how I was, and where I first saw my aunt Desire, who had been suffering with neuralgia and was not present at dinner on the night of my arrival. She sent me her love, however, and the next day came into my room, languid and graceful, with a pretty air of invalidism about her, and a good deal of powder on her face, reminding me of a beautiful ball-dress which has done service through several seasons and been turned and made over and freshened up until it looks almost as well as new. Her dress, of some soft, cream-colored material was artistically draped around her fine figure and fastened on the left side with a ribbon bow of baby blue, and her fair hair, in which there was very little gray, was worn low on her neck in a large, flat knot, from which a few curls were escaping and adding to her youthful appearance. If I had not known that she was over fifty, I might, in my darkened room, easily have mistaken her for a young girl, and I told her so when after kissing me and telling me who she was, she sank into the rocking-chair and asked me if she looked at all as I thought she would.

With a merry laugh, which showed her white, even teeth, she said, “I like that. I like to look young, if I am fifty, which I will confess to you just because Kizzy will be sure to tell you; otherwise, torture could not wring it from me. A woman is as old as she feels, and I feel about twenty-five. Nor do I think it is necessary to blurt out my age all the time, as Kizzy does. It’s no crime to be old, but public opinion and women themselves have made it so. Let two of them get to saying nasty things about a third, and they are sure to add several years to her age, while even men call a girl right old before she is thirty, and doesn’t that prove that although age may be honorable it is not desirable, and should be fought against as long as possible? And I intend to fight it, too, and thus far have succeeded pretty well, or should, if it were not for Kizzy, who has the most aggravating way of saying to me, ‘You ought not to do so at your time of life,’ and ‘at your age,’ as if I were a hundred.”

I listened to her in amazement and admiration too. She was so pretty and graceful and earnest that although I thought her rather silly, and wished that in her fight against time she did not make up quite so much as I knew she did, I was greatly drawn towards her, and for a while forgot my headache as she told me of her ailments, which were legion, and with which Aunt Kizzy had little sympathy. “Kizzy thinks all one has to do is to exercise his will and make an effort, as Mrs. Chick insisted poor Fanny should do in ‘Dombey and Son,’” she said, and then went on to give me glimpses of their family life and bits of family history, all of which were, of course, very interesting to me. Aunt Brier, I heard, had been engaged, when young, to a very fine young man, but Aunt Kizzy broke up the match because she wished Beriah to marry some one in the Hepburn line, which was frightfully tangled up with the Morton line.

“It would take too long to explain the tangle,” she said, “and so I shall not try. It estranged your father from us, and his father before him, because each took the woman of his choice in spite of the line.”

Then she told me of her own dead love, to whose memory she had been faithful thirty years, and who so often visited her in her dreams that he was as much a reality now as the day he died.

“And that is why I try to keep young, for where he has gone they know no lapse of time, and if he can see me, as I believe he can, I do not want to look old to him,” she said, with a pathetic sob, while her white hands worked nervously.

Then she told me that I was in the Glory Hole, which my father had so named, and told me, too, that she and Beriah had fought for the larger room, but had given in to Kizzy, as they always did.

“I believe she has an invisible cat-o’-nine-tails which makes us all afraid of her,” she added; “but, really, when you get down to the kernel it is good as gold, and you can get there if you try. Don’t seem afraid of her, or fond of her, either. She hates gush, and she hates cowardice and deceit; but she adores manner and etiquette as she knew it forty years ago, and dislikes everything modern and new.”

She did not tell me all this at one sitting, for she came to see me twice during the two days I kept my bed, and at each visit told me so much that I felt pretty well informed with regard to the family history, and began to lose my dread of Aunt Keziah and to feel less nervous when I heard her quick step and sharp voice in the hall. I knew she meant to be kind, and knew, too, that she was watching me curiously and trying to make up her mind as to what manner of creature I was, and whether I was feigning sickness or not. As she had never had a hard headache in her life, she did not know how to sympathize with one who had, and at the close of the second day she made me understand that mine had lasted long enough and that all I required now was an effort and fresh air, and that she should expect me down to breakfast the next morning. And as I was better, I made the effort, and at precisely half-past seven followed my three aunts down the stairs in a methodical, military kind of way, which reminded me of the school in Meadowbrook, where we used to march to the sound of a drum and a leader’s call of “Left, right; left, right,” Aunt Kizzy in this case being the leader and putting her foot down with an energy which marked all her movements.

The table was laid with great care, and Aunt Keziah said grace with her eyes open and upon black Tom, who was slyly purloining a lump of sugar from the bowl on the sideboard, and who nearly choked himself in his efforts to swallow it in time for his Amen, which was very audible and made me laugh in spite of my fear of Aunt Kizzy. When breakfast was over I was invited into her room, where I underwent a rigid cross-examination as to what I had learned at school, as well as done and left undone. I was also told what I could do and not do at Morton Park. There was a new Steinway in the drawing-room, on which I could practice each day from nine to ten and from three to four, but at no other time unless specially invited. Nor was I to sing unless asked to do so, while humming to myself was out of the question, as something very reprehensible. I was never to cross my feet when I sat down, nor lean back in my chair, nor put my hands upon the table, and above all things she hoped I did not whistle, and had not acquired a taste for banjoes and bicycles, as she heard some young ladies had.

With her sharp eyes upon me I was forced to confess that I could whistle a little and play the banjo, and had only been kept from buying one by lack of means, and also that when in Meadowbrook I had tried to ride a wheel.

“A Morton on a wheel and playing a banjo!” she exclaimed, in horror. “Surely, surely, you did not inherit this low taste from your father’s family. It is not the Morton blood which whistles and rides on wheels. It is your——”

Something in my face must have checked her, for she stopped suddenly and stared at me, while I said, “Aunt Kizzy, I know you mean my mother, and I want to tell you now that in every respect she was my father’s equal, and was the sweetest, loveliest woman I ever saw, and my father was so fond of her. I know you were angry because he married her, and you were very unjust to her, but she never said a word against you, and now she is dead I will hear nothing against her. She was my mother, and I am more like her than like the Mortons, and I am glad of it.”

This was not very respectful language, I knew, and I half expected her to box my ears, but she did nothing of the kind, and it seemed to me as if her expression softened towards me as she went on asking questions about other and different matters, and finally dismissed me with the advice that I should lie down awhile, as I looked pale and tired. That was four weeks ago, and since that time I have learned to know her better, and have found many good points which I admire. She has never mentioned my mother to me since that day, but has asked me many questions about my father and our home in Meadowbrook. In most things, too, I have my own way and am very happy, for Aunt Keziah has withdrawn some of her restrictions. I practice now when I like, and sing when I please, and even hum a little to myself, and once, when she was gone, I whistled “Annie Rooney” to my own accompaniment, with Aunts Dizzy and Brier for audience. I have seen a good many of the Versailles people, and have had compliments enough on my beauty to turn any girl’s head. I have learned every nook and corner of the house and park, and become quite attached to my Glory Hole, which I really prefer to the great room adjoining it, with its high-post bedstead and canopy, and its stiff mahogany furniture, which Aunt Kizzy says is nearly a hundred years old.

It looks a thousand, as does the furniture in the next room beyond, which puzzles me a little, it smells so like a man, and a young man, too. By this I mean that there is in it a decided odor of tobacco and cigars, and the leather-covered easy-chair looks to me as if some man had often lounged in it, while I know there are a smoking-jacket and a pair of men’s slippers there.

Funny that such things should be in this house of the Vestal Virgins, as I call them, and bye-and-bye I shall get to be one, I suppose, and tend the sacred fires, and go on errands of mercy, unless, indeed, I fall in love and am buried alive, as were the erring Vestals of old, which God forbid.

I wish that room did not bother me as it does. I think it is kept locked most of the time, but two days ago I saw Rache cleaning it, and walked in, as a matter of course, and smelled the cigars, and saw the jacket and the slippers in the closet, and asked Rache whose room it was. She stammers a little, and I could not quite make out what she said; and just as I was going to repeat my question Aunt Kizzy appeared and with a gesture of her hand waived me from the room, which remains to me as much a mystery as ever. I could, of course, ask one or all of my aunts about it, but by some intuition I seem to know that they do not care to talk about it. Indeed, I have felt ever since I have been here that there is something they are keeping from me, and I believe it is connected with this room, which may have been my father’s, or grandfather’s, or great-grandfather’s, although the smell is very much like the cigars of the Harvard boys, and that smoking-jacket had a modern look. But, whatever the mystery is, I mean in time to find it out.

CHAPTER VII.—Keziah’s Story.
A SOLILOQUY.

Doris is here, and has been for four weeks, and in spite of myself I am drawn to her more and more every day. I did not want her to come, and I meant to be cold and distant to her, but when she looked at me with something in her blue eyes like Gerold, I began to soften, while the sight of Gerold’s trunk unnerved me wholly. I gave it to him when he first went away to college, and I remember so well how pleased he was, and how he put his arms around me and kissed me, as he thanked me for it, and said, “Auntie, the trunk is so big that I shall not bring it home at my vacations, but leave it in New Haven. So when you see it again it will be full of honors, and I shall be an A. B., of whom you will be so proud.”

God forgive me if I have done wrong; that was twenty-five years ago, and Gerold is dead, and his trunk was brought back to me by his daughter, whose face is not his face, although very, very beautiful. I acknowledge that to myself, and rebel against it a little, as I mentally contrast it with Dorothea’s and wonder what Grant will think of it. I have surely done well to keep him from all knowledge of her until he was engaged to Dorothea, and even now I tremble a little for the result when he is thrown in contact with her every day, for aside from her wonderful beauty there is a grace and charm about her that Dorothea lacks, and had I seen her before she came here I should have kept her at the North until after Grant’s marriage, which I mean shall take place as early as Christmas.

He is coming home sooner than I expected; indeed he sails in two or three days, and I must tell her at once that she has a cousin, and in some way put her on her honor not to try to attract him. It is a difficult thing to do, for the girl has a spirit of her own, and there is sometimes a flash in her eyes which I do not like to meet. I saw it first when I said something derogatory of her mother. How her eyes blazed, and how grand she was in her defense, and how I respected her for it!

Ah me, that Hepburn lease! What mischief it has wrought, and how the ghosts of the past haunt me at times, when I remember the stand I have taken to save our house from ruin! Beriah says I am a monomaniac on the subject, and also that she doubts the validity of the lease. But that does not matter. My father bade me respect Amos Hepburn’s wishes, and I shall, to the letter, if Grant does not marry Dorothea.

I must stop now and superintend the opening of a box which by some mistake Grant left at Cambridge and did not think necessary to have forwarded to us until recently, when he gave orders to have it sent us by express, It has in it a little of everything, he wrote, and among the rest a picture which he thinks will interest and puzzle us as it has him. I hear Tom hammering at the box, and must go and see to it.

CHAPTER VIII.—Doris’s Story.
MY COUSIN GRANTLEY.

I have solved the mystery of that room with the smell of cigars and the smoking-jacket. It does belong to a man, and that man is Grantley Montague, and Grantley Montague is my second cousin. Aunt Kizzy told me all about him this morning, and I am still so dazed and bewildered and glad and indignant that I can scarcely write connectedly about it. Why was the knowledge that Grant was my cousin kept from me so long, and from him, too, as he is still as ignorant as I was a few hours ago? Aunt Kizzy’s explanation was very lame. She said if he had known that he had a cousin at Wellesley when he was in Harvard, nothing could have kept him from seeing me so often that we should both have been interrupted in our studies,—that she did not approve of students visiting the girls while they were in school,—and that she hardly knew why she did not tell me as soon as I came here. This was not very satisfactory, and I believe there is something behind; but when I appealed to Aunts Dizzy and Beriah, and said I was hurt and angry, Aunt Brier did not answer at all, but Aunt Dizzy said, “I don’t blame you, and I’d have told you long ago if I had not been so afraid of Kizzy;” and that is all I could get from her.

But I know now that Grant is my cousin; and this is how it happened. This morning, as I was crossing the back piazza, I saw Tom opening a box which had come by express and which Aunt Kizzy was superintending. Taking a seat on the side piazza, I thought no more about it until I heard Aunt Kizzy say, very hurriedly and excitedly, “Go, boy, and call Miss Desire and Miss Beriah,—quick,” and a moment after I heard them both exclaim, and caught the sound of my father’s name, Gerold. Then I arose, and, going around the corner, saw them bending over a picture which I recognized at once, and in a moment I was kneeling by it and kissing it as I would have kissed my father’s hand had it suddenly been reached to me.

“Oh, the picture!” I cried. “It is my father’s; he painted it. I saw him do it. He said it was a picture of his aunties, and this is himself. Dear father!” And I touched the face of the young man who was standing behind the woman with the baby in her lap.

Aunt Kizzy was very white, and her voice shook as she asked me to explain, which I did rapidly and clearly, telling all I knew of the picture, which had been sold to some gentleman from Boston for fifty dollars.

“And,” I added, “that fifty dollars went to pay his funeral expenses, poor dear father. He was ill so long, and we were so poor.”

I was crying, and in fact we were all crying together, Aunt Kizzy the hardest of all, so that the hemstitched handkerchief she always carried so gingerly was quite moist and limp. I was the first to recover myself, and asked:

“How did it get here? Whose box is this?”

“Our nephew’s, Grantley Montague, who was graduated at Harvard last year and is now in Europe. He left this box in Cambridge by mistake, and it was not sent to us until yesterday. We are expecting him home in a short time. He must have bought the picture for its resemblance to us, although he could not have known that it was painted for us.”

It was Aunt Kizzy who told me this very rapidly, as if anxious to get it off her mind, and I noticed that she did not look at me as she spoke, and that she seemed embarrassed and anxious to avoid my gaze.

“Grantley Montague,—your nephew! Then he is my cousin!” I exclaimed, while every particular connected with the young man came back to me, and none more distinctly than the telegram, No, sent in response to my request that I might attend his tea-party.

I know that my eyes were flashing as they confronted Aunt Kizzy, who stammered out:

“Your second cousin,—yes. Did you happen to see him while at Wellesley?”

She was trying to be very cool, but I was terribly excited, and, losing all fear of her, replied:

“No; you took good care that I should meet no Harvard boys; but I saw Grantley Montague once on the train, and I heard so much about him, but I never dreamed he was my cousin. If I had, nothing would have kept me from him. Did he know I was there?”

“He knows nothing of you whatever,” Aunt Kizzy said. “I did not think it best he should as it might have interfered with the studies of you both. He is coming soon, and you will of course make his acquaintance.”

I was sitting upon the box and crying bitterly, not only for the humiliation and injustice done to me, but from a sense of all I had lost by not knowing that Grantley was my cousin.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said, when she asked why I cried. “It would have made me so happy, and I have been so lonely at times, with no one of my own blood to care for me, and I should have been so proud of him; and when he invited me to his party, why didn’t you let me go? I did everything to please you. You did nothing to please me!”

I must have been hysterical, for my voice sounded very loud and unnatural as I reproached her, while she tried to soothe me and explain. But I would not be soothed, and kept on crying until I could cry no longer, and still, in the midst of my pain, I was conscious of a great joy welling up in my heart, as I reflected that Grantley was my cousin, and that I should soon see him in spite of Aunt Kizzy, who, I think, was really sorry for me and did not resent what I said to her. She had me in her room for an hour after lunch, and tried to smooth the matter over.

“You are very pretty,” she said, “and Grant is very susceptible to a pretty face, and if he had seen yours he might have paid you attentions which would have turned your head, and perhaps have done you harm as they would have meant nothing. They couldn’t mean anything; they must mean nothing.”

She was getting more and more excited, and began to walk the floor as she went on:

“I may as well tell you that I dread his coming. He is very magnetic,—with something about him which attracts every one. Your father had it, and your grandfather before him, and Grant has it, and you will be influenced by it, but it must not be. Oh, why did I let you come here, with your fatal beauty, which is sure to work us evil? or, having come, why are you not in the Hepburn line?”

I thought she had gone crazy, and stared at her wonderingly as she continued:

“I can’t explain now what I mean, except that Grant must marry money, and you have none. You have only your beauty, which is sure to impress him, but it must not be. Promise me, Doris, to be discreet, and not try to attract him,—not try to win his love.”

“Aunt Keziah! What do you take me for!” I exclaimed, indignantly, and she replied:

“Forgive me; I hardly know what I am saying; only it must not be. You must not mar my scheme, though if you were in the line, I’d accept you so gladly as Grantley’s wife.” And then, to my utter amazement, she stooped and kissed me, for the first time since I had known her.

A great deal more she said to me, and when the interview was over, there was on my mind a confused impression that I was not to interfere with her plan of marrying Grantley to a rich wife,—Dorothea Haynes, probably, although no mention was made of her,—and also that I was to treat him very coldly and not in any way try to attract him. The idea was so ludicrous that after a little it rather amused than displeased me, but did not in the least lessen my desire to see the young man who had been the lion at Harvard, and whom I had seen in the car whistling an accompaniment to Dorothea’s banjo.

I have told Aunts Desire and Beriah of that incident, and of nearly all I had heard with regard to Grantley and Dorothea, but the only comment they made was that they had known Miss Haynes since she was a child, that she had visited at Morton Park, and would probably come there again in the autumn. Once I thought to ask if she were engaged to Grantley, but the wall of reserve which they manage to throw about them when the occasion requires it, kept me silent, and I can only speculate upon it and anticipate the time when I shall stand face to face with Grantley Montague.

CHAPTER IX.—The Author’s Story.
GRANTLEY AND DORIS.

It was one of those lovely summer days, neither too hot nor too cold, which sometimes occur in Kentucky even in August. The grounds at Morton Park were looking their best, for there had been a heavy shower the previous night, and since sunrise three negroes had been busy mowing and rolling and pruning and weeding until there was scarcely a twig or dead leaf to be seen upon the velvet lawn, while the air was sweet with the odor of the flowers in the beds and on the broad borders. Mas’r Grantley was expected home on the morrow, and that was incentive enough for the blacks to do their best, for the negroes worshiped their young master, who, while maintaining a proper dignity of manner, was always kind and considerate and even familiar with them to a certain extent. Within doors everything was also ready for the young man. Keziah had indulged in a new cap, Dizzy in a pretty tea-gown, while Beriah had spent her surplus money for a new fur rug for Grant’s room, which had been made very bright and attractive with the decorations which had come with the picture in the box from Cambridge. As for Doris, she had nothing new, nor did she need anything, and she made a very pretty picture in her simple muslin dress and big garden-hat, when about four o’clock she took a book and sauntered down to a summer-house in the rear of the grounds, near the little gate which opened upon the turnpike and was seldom used except when some one of the family wished to go out that way to call upon a neighbor or meet the stage.

Taking a seat in the arbor, Doris was soon so absorbed in her book as not to hear the stage from Frankfort when it stopped at the gate, or to see the tall young man with satchel in one hand and light walking-cane in the other who came up the walk at a rapid rate and quickened his steps when he caught a glimpse of a light dress among the green of the summer-house. Grantley, who had been spending a little time with Dorothea at Wilmot Terrace, which was a mile or more out of Cincinnati, had not intended to come home until the next day, but there had suddenly come over him an intense longing to see his aunts and the old place, which he could not resist, while, to say the truth, he was getting a little tired of constant companionship with Dorothea and wished to get away from her and rest. It was all very well, he said to himself, to be kissed and caressed and made much of by a nice girl for a while, but there was such a thing as too much of it, and a fellow would rather do some of the love-making himself. Dorothea was all right, of course, and he liked her better than any girl he had ever seen, although she was not his ideal, which he should never find. He had given that up, and the Lost Star did not now flit across his memory as often as formerly, although he had not forgotten her, and still saw at times the face which had shone upon him for a brief moment and then been lost, as he believed, forever. He was not, however, thinking of it now, when, wishing to surprise his aunts, he dismounted from the stage at the gate and came hurrying up the walk,—the short cut to the house. Catching sight of Doris’s dress, and thinking it was his aunt Desire, he called out in his loud, cheery voice, “Hello, Aunt Dizzy! You look just like a young girl in that blue gown and big hat with poppies on it. Are you glad to see me?”

In an instant Doris was on her feet and confronting him with the bright color staining her cheeks and a kindling light in her blue eyes as she went forward to meet him. She knew who it was, and, with a bright smile which made his heart beat rapidly, she offered him her hand and said, “I am not your aunt Dizzy, but if you are Grantley Montague I am your cousin, Doris Morton,—Gerald Morton’s daughter,—and I am very glad to see you.”

For the first time in his life Grantley’s speech forsook him. Here was his Lost Star, declaring herself to be his cousin! What did it mean? Dropping his satchel and taking off his soft hat, with which he fanned himself furiously, he exclaimed, “Great Scott! My cousin Doris! Gerold Morton’s daughter! I don’t understand you. I never knew he had a daughter, or much about him any way. Where have you kept yourself, that I have never seen or heard of you, and why haven’t my aunts told me of you?”

He had her hand in his, as he led her back to the summer-house, while she said to him. “A part of the time I have been at Wellesley. I was there when you were at Harvard, and used to hear a great deal of you, although I never dreamed you were my cousin till I came here.”

This took his breath away, and, sitting down beside her, he plied her with questions until he knew all that she knew of her past and why they had been kept apart so long.

“By Jove, I don’t like it,” he said. “Why, if I had known you were at Wellesley I should have spent half my time on the road between there and Harvard——”

“And the other half between Harvard and Madame De Moisiere’s?” Doris said, archly, as she moved a little from him, for he had a hand on her shoulder now.

“What do you mean?” he asked, quickly, while something of the light faded from his eyes, and the eagerness from his voice.

“I heard a great deal about you from different sources, and about Miss Haynes, too; and I once saw you with her in the train whistling an accompaniment to her banjo,” Doris replied.

“The dickens you did!” Grant said, dropping Doris’s hand, which he had held so closely.

It is a strange thing to say of an engaged young man that the mention of his betrothed was like a breath of cold wind chilling him suddenly, but it was so in Grant’s case. With the Lost Star sitting by him, he had for a moment forgotten Dorothea, whose farewell kiss was only a few hours old.

“The dickens you did! Well, I suppose you thought me an idiot; but what did you think of Dorothea?” he asked, and Doris replied:

“I thought her very nice, and wished I might know her, for I felt sure I should like her. And she is coming to Morton Park in the autumn. Aunt Brier told me.

“Yes, I believe she is to visit us then,” Grant said, without a great deal of enthusiasm, and then, changing the conversation, he began to ask about his aunts, and what Doris thought of them, and if she were happy with them, and when she first heard he was her cousin, and how.

She told him of the box and the picture which had led to the disclosure, and which she had recognized at once.

“And your father was the artist!” he exclaimed. “By Jove, that’s funny! How things come round! I found it in a dealer’s shop and bought it because it looked so much like my aunts, although I did not really suppose they were the originals, as I never remembered them as they are on the canvas. And that moon-faced baby was meant for me, was it? What did you think of him?”

“I didn’t think him very interesting,” Doris replied; and then they both laughed, and said the pleasant nothings which two young people who are pleased with each other are apt to say, and on the strength of their cousinship became so confidential and familiar that at the end of half an hour Doris felt that she had known Grant all her life, while he could scarcely have told how he did feel.

Doris’s beauty, freshness, and vivacity, so different from what he had been accustomed to in the class of girls he had known, charmed and intoxicated him, while the fact that she was his cousin and the Lost Star bewildered and confused him; and added to this was a feeling of indignation that he had so long been kept in ignorance of her existence.

“I don’t like it in Aunt Kizzy, and I mean to tell her so,” he said, at last, as he rose to his feet, and, picking up his satchel, went striding up the walk towards the house, with Doris at his side.

It was now nearly six o’clock, and Aunt Kizzy was adjusting her cap and giving sundry other touches to her toilet preparatory to dinner, when, glancing from her window, she saw the young couple as they emerged from a side path, Doris with her sun-hat in her hand and her hair blowing about her glowing face, which was lifted towards Grant, who was looking down at her and talking rapidly. Miss Kizzy knew Doris was pretty, but never had the girl’s beauty struck her as it did now, when she saw her with Grant and felt an indefinable foreboding that the Hepburn line was in danger.

“Doris is a flirt, and Grant is no better, and I’ll send for Dorothea at once. There is no need to wait until autumn,” she said to herself, as she went down stairs and out upon the piazza, where Beriah and Desire were already, for both had seen him from the parlor and had hurried out to meet him.

“Hello, hello, hello,” he said to each of the three aunts, as he kissed them affectionately. “I know you didn’t expect me,” he continued, as, with the trio clinging to him and making much of him, he went into the house,—“I know you didn’t expect me so soon, but the fact is I was homesick and wished to see you all and so I came. I hope you are glad. And, I say, why in the name of all that is good didn’t you ever tell me I had a cousin,—and at Wellesley, too? And why did you never tell me more of Cousin Gerold, who, it seems, painted that picture of you all? It’s awfully queer. Hello, Tom, how d’ye?” he added, as a woolly head appeared in the doorway and a grinning negro answered:

“Jes’ tol’able, thanky, Mas’r Grant. How d’ye youself?”

Keziah was evidently very glad of this diversion, which turned the conversation away from Doris, who had remained outside, with a feeling that for the present the aunts must have Grant to themselves. How handsome and bright and magnetic he was, and how gay he made the dinner with his jokes and merry laugh! Once, however, it seemed to Doris that a shadow flitted across his face, and that was when Miss Keziah asked after Dorothea.

“Oh, she’s right well,” he answered, indifferently, and when his aunt continued:

“Didn’t she hate to have you leave so abruptly?” he replied, laughingly:

“She paid me the compliment of saying so, but I reckon Aleck Grady will console her for awhile.”

“Who is Aleck Grady?” Miss Morton asked, and Grant replied:

“Have I never written you about Aleck Grady? A good fellow enough, but an awful bore, and a second cousin of Thea’s, who joined us in Egypt and has been with us ever since.”

Beriah had heard of him, but Miss Morton could not recall him, and continued to ask questions about him as if she scented danger from him as well as from Doris. Was he in the Hepburn line and really Thea’s cousin, and did she like him?

At the mention of the Hepburn line Grant’s face clouded, and he answered rather stiffly:

“He is in the Hepburn line, one degree removed from Thea, and he is hunting for a missing link, which, if found, will knock Thea into a cocked hat.”

Miss Morton knew about the missing link herself; indeed, she had once tried to trace it, but had given it up with the conviction that it was extinct, and if she thought so, why, then, it was so, and Aleck Grady would never find it. But he might be dangerous elsewhere, and she repeated her question as to whether Thea liked him or not.

“I dare say,—as her cousin,” Grant replied, adding, with a view to tease his aunt, “and she may get up a warmer feeling, for there is no guessing what will happen when a young man is teaching a girl to ride a bicycle, as he is teaching Thea.”

“Ride a bicycle! Thea on a bicycle! Thea astride of a wheel!” Miss Morton exclaimed, horrified and aghast at the idea.

Was the world all topsy-turvy, or had she lived so long out of it that she had lost her balance and fallen off? She did not know, and she looked very white and worried, while Grant laughed at her distress and told her how picturesque Thea looked in her blue gown and red shoes and jockey cap, adding:

“And she rides well, too, which is more than can be said of all the girls. But it is of no use to kick at the bicycles; they have come to stay, and I mean to get Doris one as soon as I can. She must not be left out in the cold when Thea and I go racing down the turnpike. She will be splendid on a wheel.”

“God forbid!” came with a gasp from the highly scandalized lady, while Doris’s eyes shone with a wonderful brilliancy as they looked their thanks at Grant.

With a view to change the conversation, Beriah began to question Grant of his trip to Egypt, without a suspicion of the deep waters into which she was sailing. After describing some of the excursions on the donkeys, Grant suddenly exclaimed:

“By the way, Aunt Brier, I met an old acquaintance of yours in Cairo, Tom Atkins, who said he used to visit Morton Park. Do you remember him?”

Beriah was white to the roots of her hair, and her hand shook so that her coffee was spilled upon the damask cloth as she answered, faintly:

“Tom Atkins? yes, I remember him.”

It was Keziah who came to the rescue now by giving the signal to leave the table, and so put an end for the time being to the conversation concerning Tom Atkins; but that evening, after most of the family had retired, as Grant sat smoking in the moonlight at the end of the piazza, a slender figure clad in a gray wrapper with a white scarf on her head stole up to him and said, very softly and sadly:

“Now, Grant, tell me about Tom.”

Grant told her all he knew, and that night Beriah wrote in her diary as follows:

“Tom is alive, and wears a fez and a white flannel suit, and has a little, dark-eyed, tawny-haired girl whom he calls Zaidee. Of course there is or has been an Oriental wife, and Tom is as much lost to me as if he were sleeping in his grave. I am glad he is alive, and think I am glad because of the little girl Zaidee. It is a pretty name, and if she were motherless I know I could love her dearly for Tom’s sake, but such happiness is not for me. Ah, well, God knows best.”

CHAPTER X.—Doris’s Story.
THEA AT MORTON PARK.

Thea is here, and has brought her wheel and her banjo and her pet dog, besides three trunks of clothes. The dog, whom she calls Cheek, has conceived an unaccountable dislike to Aunt Kizzy, at whom he barks so furiously whenever she is in sight that Thea keeps him tied in her room except when she takes him into the grounds for exercise. Even then he is on the lookout for the enemy, and once made a fierce charge at her shawl, which she had left in the summer-house and which was not rescued from him until one or two rents had been made in it. Thea laughs, and calls him a bad boy, and puts her arms around Aunt Kizzy’s neck and kisses her and tells her she will send Cheek home as soon as she gets a chance, and then she sings “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay,” which she says is all the rage, and she dances the skirt dance with Grant, to whom she is teaching a new step, which shows her pretty feet and ankles and consists mostly of “one-two-three-kick.” And they do kick, or Grant does, so high that Aunt Kizzy asks in alarm if that is quite proper, and then Thea kisses her again and calls her “an unsophisticated old darling who doesn’t know the ways of the world and must be taught.” Her banjo lies round anywhere and everywhere, just as do her hat and her gloves and parasol, and Aunt Kizzy, who is so particular with me, never says a word, but herself picks up after the disorderly girl, who, with Grant, has turned the house upside down and filled it with laughter and frolic. Her wheel stays at night in a little room at the end of the piazza, with Grant’s, for he has one, and with Thea he goes scurrying through the town, sometimes in the street and sometimes on the sidewalk, to the terror of the pedestrians. Thea has already knocked down two negroes and run into the stall of an old apple-woman, who would have brought a suit if Aunt Kizzy had not paid the damages claimed.

What do I think of Thea? I love her, and have loved her from the moment she came up to me so cordially and called me Cousin Doris, and told me Grant had written her all about me, and that because I was at Morton Park she had come earlier than she had intended doing, and had left her old Gardy and Aleck Grady disconsolate. “But,” she added, quickly: “Aleck is coming soon, and then it will be jolly with four of us, Grant and you, Aleck and me, and if we can’t paint the town red my name is not Thea.”

I don’t suppose she is really pretty, except her eyes, which are lovely, but her voice is so sweet and her manners so soft and kittenish and pleasing that you never stop to think if she is handsome, but take her as she is and find her charming. She occupies the guest-room of course, and I share it with her, for she insisted at once that my cot be moved in there, so we could “talk nights as late as we pleased.” Aunt Kizzy, who does not believe in talking late, and always knocks on the wall if she hears me move in the Glory Hole after half-past nine, objected at first, saying it was more proper for young girls to room alone, but Thea told her that propriety had gone out of fashion with a lot of other stuff, and insisted, until the Glory Hole was abandoned and used only for toilet-purposes.

“Just what it was intended for,” Thea said, “and the idea of penning you up there is ridiculous. I know Aunt Kizzy, as I always call her, and know exactly how to manage her.”

And she does manage her beautifully, while I look on amazed. The first night after her arrival she invited me into her room, where I found her habited in a crimson dressing-gown, with her hair, which had grown very long, rippling down her back, and a silver-mounted brush in one hand and a hand-glass in the other. There was a light-wood fire on the hearth, for it was raining heavily, and the house was damp and chilly. Drawing a settee rocker before the fire, she made me sit down close by her, and, putting her arm around me and laying my head on her shoulder, she said, “Now, Chickie,—or rather Softie, which suits you better, as you seem just like the kind of girls who are softies,—now let’s talk.”

“But,” I objected, “Aunt Kizzy’s room is just below, and it’s nearly ten o’clock, and she will hear us and rap.”

“Let her rap! I am not afraid of Aunt Kizzy. She never raps me; and if you are so awfully particular, we’ll whisper, while I tell you all my secrets, and you tell me yours,—about the boys, I mean. Girls don’t count. Tell me of the fellows, and the scrapes you got into at school.”

It was in vain that I protested that I had no secrets and knew nothing about fellows or scrapes. She knew better, she said, for no girl could go through any school and not know something about them unless she were a greater softie than I looked to be.

“I was always getting into a scrape, or out of one,” she said, “and it was such fun. Why, I never learned a blessed thing,—I didn’t go to learn, and I kept the teachers so stirred up that their lives were a burden to them, and I know they must have made a special thank-offering to some missionary fund when I left. And yet I know they liked me in spite of my pranks. And to think you were stuffing your head with knowledge at Wellesley all the time, and I never knew it, nor Grant either! I tell you he don’t like it any better than I do. And Aunt Kizzy’s excuse, that you would have neglected your studies if you had known he was at Harvard, is all rubbish. That was not the reason. Do you know what the real one was?”

I said I did not, and with a little laugh she continued, “You are a softie, sure enough;” then, pushing me a little from her, she regarded me attentively a moment, and continued, “Do you know how very, very beautiful you are?”

I might have disclaimed such knowledge, if something in her bright, searching eyes had not wrung the truth in part from me, and made me answer, “I have been told so a few times.”

“Of course you have,” she replied. “Who told you?”

“Oh, the girls at Wellesley,” I answered, beginning to feel uneasy under the fire of her eyes.

“Humbug!” she exclaimed. “I tell you, girls don’t count. I mean boys. What boy has told you you were handsome? Has Grant? Honor bright, has Grant?”

The question was so sudden that I was taken quite aback, while conscious guilt, if I can call it that, added to my embarrassment. It was three weeks since Grant came home, and in that time we had made rapid strides towards something warmer than friendship. We had ridden and driven together for miles around the country, had played and sung together, and walked together through the spacious grounds, and once when we sat in the summer-house and I had told him of my father’s and mother’s death and my life in Meadowbrook and Wellesley, and how lonely I had sometimes been because no one cared for me, he had put his arm around me, and, kissing my forehead, had said, “Poor little Dorey! I wish I had known you were at Wellesley. You should never have been lonely;” and then he told me that he had seen me twice in Boston, once at a concert and once in a street-car, and had never forgotten my face, which he thought beautiful, and that he had called me his Lost Star, whom he had looked for so long and found at last. And as he talked I had listened with a heart so full of happiness that I could not speak, although with the happiness there was a pang of remorse when I remembered what Aunt Keziah had said about my not trying to win Grant’s love. And I was not trying; the fault, if there were any, was on his side, and probably he meant nothing. At all events, the scene in the summer-house was not repeated, and I fancied that Grant’s manner after it was somewhat constrained, as if he were a little sorry. But he had kissed me and told me I was beautiful, and when Thea put the question to me direct, I stammered out at last, “Ye-es, Grant thinks I am handsome.”

“Of course he does. How can he help it? And I don’t mind, even if we are engaged.”

“Engaged!” I repeated, and drew back from her a little, for, although I had suspected the engagement, I had never been able to draw from my aunts any allusion to it or admission of it, and I had almost made myself believe that there was none.

But I knew it now, and for a moment I felt as if I were smothering, while Thea regarded me curiously, but with no jealousy or anger in her gaze.

“You are surprised,” she said at last. “Has neither of the aunts told you?”

“No,” I replied, “they have not, but I have sometimes suspected it. And I have reason to think that such a marriage would please Aunt Kizzy very much. Let me congratulate you.”

“You needn’t,” she said, a little stiffly. “It is all a made-up affair. Shall I tell you about myself?” And, drawing me close to her again, she told me that at a very early age she became an orphan, with a large fortune as a certainty when she was twenty-one, as she would be at Christmas, and another fortune coming to her in the spring, if she did not marry Grant, and half in case she did. “It’s an awful muddle,” she continued, “and you can’t understand it. I don’t either, except that one of my ancestors, old Amos Hepburn, of Keswick, England, made a queer will, or condition, or something, by which the Mortons will lose their home unless I marry Grant, which is not a bad thing to do. I have known him all my life, and like him so much; and it is not a bad thing for him to marry me, either. Better do that than lose his home.”

“Would he marry you just for money?” I asked, while the spot on my forehead, which he had kissed, burned so that I thought she must see it.

But she was brushing her long hair and twisting it into braids, and did not look at me as she went on rapidly: “No, I don’t think he would marry me for my money unless he liked me some. Aleck wouldn’t, and Grant thinks himself vastly superior to Aleck, whom he calls a bore and a crank; and perhaps he is, but he is very nice,—not handsome like Grant, and not like him in anything. He has reddish hair, and freckles on his nose, and big hands, and wears awful baggy clothes, and scolds me a good deal, which Grant never does, and tells me I am fast and slangy, and that I powder too much. He is my second cousin, you know, and stands next to me in the Hepburn line, and if I should die he would come in for the Morton estate, unless he finds the missing link, as he calls it, which is ahead of us both. I am sure you will like him, and I shall be so glad when he comes. I am not half as silly with him as I am without him, because I am a little afraid of him, and I miss him so much.”

As I knew nothing of Aleck, I did not reply, and after a moment, during which she finished braiding her hair and began to do up her bangs in curl-papers, she said, abruptly, “Why don’t you speak? Don’t you tumble?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, and with very expressive gestures of her hands, which she had learned abroad, she exclaimed, “Now, you are not so big a softie as not to know what tumble means, and you have been graduated at Wellesley, too! You are greener than I thought, and I give it up. But you just wait till I have coached you awhile, and you’ll know what tumble means, and a good many more things of which you never dreamed.”

I said I did not like slang,—in short, that I detested it,—and we were having rather a spirited discussion on the subject, and Thea was talking in anything but a whisper, when suddenly there came a tremendous knock on the door, which in response to Thea’s prompt “Entrez” opened wide and disclosed to view the awful presence of Aunt Kizzy in her night-cap, without her false piece, felt slippers on her feet, a candle in her hand, and a look of stern disapproval on her face as she addressed herself to me, asking if I knew how late it was, and why I was keeping Thea up.

“She is not keeping me up. I am keeping her. I asked her to come in here, and when she said we should disturb you I told her we would whisper, and we have until I was stupid enough to forget myself. I’m awfully sorry, but Doris is not to blame,” Thea explained, generously defending me against Aunt Kizzy, towards whom she moved with a graceful, gliding step, adding, as she put her arm around her neck, “Now go back to bed, that’s a dear, and Doris shall go too, and we’ll never disturb you again. I wonder if you know how funny you look without your hair!”

I had never suspected Aunt Kizzy of caring much for her personal appearance, but at the mention of her hair she quickly put her hand to her head with a deprecatory look on her face, and without another word walked away, while Thea threw herself into a chair, shaking with laughter and declaring that it was a lark worthy of De Moisiere.

---

Four weeks have passed since I made my last entry in my journal, and so much has happened in that time that I feel as if I were years older than I was when Thea came, and, as she expressed it, “took me in hand.” I am certainly a great deal wiser than I was, but am neither the better nor the happier for it, and although I know now what tumble means, and all the flirtation signs, and a great deal more besides, I detest it all, and cannot help feeling that the girl who practices such things has lost something from her womanhood which good men prize. Old-maidish Thea calls me, and says I shall never be anything but a softie. And still we are great friends, for no one can help loving her, she is so bright and gay and kind. As for Grant, he puzzles me. I have tried to be distant towards him since Thea told me of her engagement, and once I spoke of it to him and asked why he did not tell me himself. I never knew before that Grant could scowl, as he did when he replied, “Oh, bother! there are some things a fellow does not care to talk about, and this is one of them. You and Thea gossip together quite too much.”

After that I didn’t speak to Grant for two whole days. But he made it up the third day in the summer-house where he had kissed me once, and would have kissed me again, but for an accident.

“Doris,” he said, as he took my face between his hands and bent his own so close to it that I felt his breath on my cheek,—“Doris, don’t quarrel with me. I can’t bear it. I——”

What more he would have said I do not know, as just then we heard Thea’s voice near by calling to Aleck Grady, who has been in town three weeks, stopping at the hotel, but spending most of his time at Morton Park, and I like him very much. He seems very plain-looking at first, but after you know him you forget his hair and his freckles and his hands and general awkwardness, and think only how thoroughly good-natured and kind and considerate he is, with a heap of common sense. Thea is not quite the same when he is with us. She is more quiet and lady-like, and does not use so much slang, and acts rather queer, it seems to me. Indeed, the three of them act queer, and I feel queer and unhappy, although I seem to be so gay, and the house and grounds resound with laughter and merriment all day long. Aleck comes early, and always stays to lunch, if invited, as he often is by Thea, but never by Aunt Kizzy, who has grown haggard and thin and finds a great deal of fault with me because, as she says, I am flirting with Grant and trying to win him from Thea.

It is false. I am not flirting with Grant. I am not trying to win him from Thea, but rather to keep out of his way, which I cannot do, for he is always at my side, and when we go for a walk, or a ride, or a drive, it is Aleck and Thea first, and necessarily Grant is left for me, and, what is very strange, he seems to like it, while I——Oh, whither am I drifting, and what shall I do? I know now all about the Morton lease and the Hepburn line, for Aunt Kizzy has told me, and with tears streaming down her cheeks has begged me not to be her ruin. And I will not, even if I should love Grant far more than I do now, and should feel surer than I do that he loves me and would gladly be free from Thea, who laughs and sings and dances as gayly as if there were no troubled hearts around her, while Aleck watches her and Grant and me with a quizzical look on his face which makes me furious at times. He has talked to me about the missing link and the family tree, which he offered to show me, but I declined, and said impatiently that I had heard enough about old Amos Hepburn and that wretched condition, and wished both had been in the bottom of the sea before they had done so much mischief. With a good-humored laugh he put up his family tree and told me not to be so hard on his poor old ancestor, saying he did not think either he or his condition would harm the Mortons much.

I don’t know what he meant, and I don’t know anything except that I am miserable, and Grant is equally so, and I do not dare stay alone with him a moment, or look in his eyes for fear of what I may see there, or he may see in mine.

Alas for us both, and alas for the Hepburn line!

CHAPTER XI.—The Author’s Story.
THE CRISIS.

It came sooner than the two who were watching the progress of affairs expected it, and the two were Kizzy and Dizzy. The first was looking at what she could not help, with a feeling like death in her heart, while the latter felt her youth come back to her as she saw one by one the signs she had once known so well. She knew what Grant’s failure to marry Thea meant to them. But she did not worry about it. With all her fear of Keziah, she had a great respect for and confidence in her, and was sure she would manage somehow, no matter whom Grant married. And so in her white gown and blue ribbons she sat upon the wide piazza day after day, and smiled upon the young people, who, recognizing an ally in her, made her a sort of queen around whose throne they gathered, all longing to tell her their secret, except Doris, who, hearing so often from her Aunt Keziah that she was the cause of all the trouble, was very unhappy, and kept away from Grant as much as possible. But he found her one afternoon in the summer-house looking so inexpressibly sweet, and pathetic, too, with the traces of tears on her face, that, without a thought of the consequences, he sat down beside her, and, putting his arms around her, said:

“My poor little darling, what is the matter, and why do you try to avoid me as you do?”

There was nothing of the coquette about Doris, and at the sound of Grant’s voice speaking to her as he did, and the touch of his hand which had taken hers and was carrying it to his lips, she laid her head on his shoulder and sobbed:

“Oh, Grant, I can’t bear it. Aunt Kizzy scolds me so, and I—I can’t help it, and I’m going to Meadowbrook to teach or do something, where I shall not trouble any one again.”

“No, Doris,” Grant said, in a voice more earnest and decided than any she had ever heard from him. “You are not going away from me. You are mine and I intend to keep you. I will play a hypocrite’s part no longer. I love you, and I do not love Thea as a man ought to love the girl he makes his wife, nor as she deserves to be loved; and even if you refuse me I shall not marry her. It would be a great sin to take her when my whole soul was longing for another.”

“Grant, are you crazy? Don’t you know you must marry Thea? Have you forgotten the Hepburn line?” Doris said, lifting her head from his shoulder and turning towards him a face which, although bathed in tears, was radiant with the light of a great joy.

Had Grant been in the habit of swearing, he would probably have consigned the Hepburn line to perdition. As it was, he said:

“Confound the Hepburn line! Enough have been made miserable on account of it, and I don’t propose to be added to the number, nor do I believe much in it, either. Aleck does not believe in it at all, and we are going to look up the law without Aunt Kizzy’s knowledge. She is so cursed proud and reticent, too, or she would have found out for herself before this time whether we are likely to be beggared or not. And even if the lease holds good, don’t you suppose that a great strapping fellow like me can take care of himself and four women?”

As he had never yet done anything but spend money, it seemed doubtful to Doris whether he could do anything or not. But she did not care. The fact that he loved her, that he held her in his arms and was covering her face with kisses, was enough for the present, and for a few moments Aunt Kizzy’s wrath and the Hepburn line were forgotten, while she abandoned herself to her great happiness. Then she remembered, and, releasing herself from Grant, stood up before him and told him that it could not be.

“I am not ashamed to confess that I love you,” she said, “and the knowing that you love me will always make me happier. But you are bound to Thea, and I will never separate you from her or bring ruin upon your family. I will go away, as I said, and never come again until you and Thea are married.”

She was backing from the summer-house as she talked, and so absorbed were she and Grant both that neither saw nor heard anything until, having reached the door, Doris backed into Thea’s arms.

“Hello!” was her characteristic exclamation, as she looked curiously at Doris and then at Grant, who, greatly confused, had risen to his feet, “And so I have caught you,” she continued, “and I suppose you think I am angry; but I am not. I am glad, as it makes easier what I am going to tell you. Sit down, Grant, and hear me,” she continued authoritatively, as she saw him moving towards the doorway, opposite to where she stood, still holding Doris tightly. “Sit down, and let’s have it out, like sensible people who have been mistaken and discovered their mistake in time. I know you love Doris, and I know she loves you, and she just suits you, for she is beautiful and sweet and fresh, while I am neither; I am homely, and fast, and slangy, and sometimes loud and forward.”

“Oh, Thea, Thea, you are not all this,” Doris cried.

But Thea went on: “Yes, I am; Aleck says so, and he knows, and that is why I like him so much. He tells me my faults straight out, which Grant never did. He simply endured me because he felt that he must, until he saw you, and then it was not in the nature of things that I could keep him any longer. I have seen it, and so has Aleck; and this morning, under the great elm in the far part of the grounds, we came to an understanding, and I told the great, awkward, ugly Aleck that I loved him better than I ever loved Grant; and I do,—I do!”

She was half crying, and breathing hard, and with each breath was severing some link which had bound her to Grant, who for once felt as awkward as Aleck himself, and stood abashed before the young girl who was so boldly declaring her preference for another. What could he say? he asked himself. He surely could not remonstrate with her, or protest against what would make him so happy, and so he kept silent, while brushing the tears from her eyes, she continued, “I don’t know when it began, or how, only it did begin, and now I don’t care how ugly he is, nor how big his feet and hands are. He is just as good as he can be, and I am going to marry him. There!”

She stopped, quite out of breath, and looked at Doris, whose face was very white, and whose voice trembled as she said:

“But, Thea, have you forgotten the lease?”

“The lease!” Thea repeated, bitterly. “I hate the very name. It has worked so much mischief, and all for nothing, Aleck says, and he knows, and don’t believe it would stand a moment, and if it does we have arranged for it, and should the Morton estate ever come to me through Aunt Kizzy’s foolish insistence, I shall deed it straight back to her, or to you and Grant, which will be better. It is time old Amos Hepburn was euchred, and I am glad to do it. Such trouble as he has brought to your grandfather, your father, and to me, thrusting me upon one who did not care a dime for me!”

“Thea, Thea, you are mistaken. I did care for you until I saw Doris, and I care for you yet,” Grant said, and Thea replied:

“In a way, yes. But you were driven to it by Aunt Kizzy, and so was I. Why, I do not remember a time when I did not think I was to marry you, and once I liked the idea, too, and threw myself at your head, and appropriated you in a way which makes me ashamed when I remember it. Aleck has told me, and he knows, and will keep me straight, while you would have let me run wild, and from a bold, pert, slangy girl I should have degenerated into a coarse, second-class woman, with only money and the Morton name to keep me up. You and Doris exactly suit each other, and your lives will glide along without a ripple, while Aleck’s and mine will be stormy at times, for he has a will and I have a temper, but the making up will be grand, and that I should never have known with you. I am going to tell Aunt Kizzy now, and have it over. So, Grant, let’s say good-bye to all there has been between us, and if you want to kiss me once in memory of the past you can do so. Doris will not mind.”

There was something very pathetic in Thea’s manner as she lifted her face for the kiss which was to part her and Grant forever, and for an instant her arms clung tightly around his neck as if the olden love were dying hard in spite of what she had said of Aleck; then without a word she went swiftly up the walk, leaving Grant and Doris alone.

CHAPTER XII.—Doris’s Story.
THE MISSING LINK.

How can I write when my heart is so full that it seems as if it would burst with its load of surprise and happiness? Grant and I are engaged, and so are Thea and Aleck, and of the two I believe Thea is happier than I, who am still so stunned that I can scarcely realize what a few hours have brought to me,—Grant, and—and—a fortune! And this is how it happened.

Grant was saying things to me which I thought he ought not to say, when Thea came suddenly upon us and told us she loved Aleck better than she did Grant, whom she transferred to me in a rather bewildering fashion, while I accepted him on condition that Aunt Kizzy gave her consent. She did not appear at dinner that night, and the next morning she was suffering from a severe headache and kept her room, but sent word that she would see Thea and Grant after breakfast. This left me to Aleck, who came early and asked me to go with him to the summer-house, where we could “talk over the row,” as he expressed it. Love had certainly wrought a great change in him, softening and refining his rugged features until he seemed almost handsome as he talked to me of Thea, whom he had fancied from the time he first saw her.

“She is full of faults, I know,” he said, “but I believe I love her the better for them, as they will add variety to our lives. She and Grant would have stagnated, as he did not care enough for her to oppose her in any way. Theirs would have been a marriage of convenience; ours will be one of love.”

And then he drifted off to the Morton lease and Hepburn line and family tree.

“You have never seen it, I believe,” he said, taking from his pocket a sheet of foolscap and spreading it out upon his lap. He had offered to show it to me before, but I had declined examining it. Now, however, I affected to be interested, and glanced indifferently at the sheet, with its queer looking diagrams and rows of names, which he called branches of the Hepburn tree. “I have not made it out quite ship-shape, like one I saw in London lately,” he said, taking out his pencil and pointing to the name which headed the list, “but I think you will understand it. You have no idea what a fascination there has been to me in hunting up my ancestors and wondering what manner of people they were. First, here is Amos Hepburn, the old curmudgeon who leased that property to your grandfather ninety years ago. He married Dorothea Foster, and had three daughters, Octavia, Agrippina, and Poppæa.”

“Octavia, Agrippina, and Poppæa,” I exclaimed. “What could have induced him to give these names to his daughters?”

“Classical taste, I suppose,” Aleck said. “No doubt the old gentleman was fond of Roman history, and the names took his fancy. If he had had a son he would probably have called him Nero. Poppæa, the youngest, is my maternal ancestress. I inherit my beauty from her.”

Here he laughed heartily, and then went on:

“Agrippina, the second daughter, was Thea’s great-grandmother, and called no doubt after the good Agrippina, and not the bad one, who had that ducking in the sea at the hands of her precious son. As to the eldest daughter, she ought to have felt honored to be named for the poor little abused Empress Octavia; and then it is a pretty name.”

“Yes, indeed,” I said, “and it is my middle name, which my grandmother and my great-grandmother bore before me.”

“That’s odd,” he rejoined, looking curiously at me. “Yes, very odd. Suppose we go over Thea’s branch of the tree first, as that is the oldest line to which a direct heir can be found, and consequently gives her the Morton estate. First, Agrippina Hepburn married John Austin, and had one child, Charlotte Poppæa, who married Tom Haynes, and bore him one daughter, Sophia, and two sons, James and John. This John, by the way, I have heard, was the young man whom Miss Keziah wished your Aunt Beriah to marry, and failing in that she wished your father to marry Sophia. But neither plan worked, for both died, and James married Victoria Snead, of Louisville, and had one daughter, Dorothea Victoria, otherwise Thea, my promised wife, and the great-great-grandaughter of old Amos Hepburn. As I, although several years older than Thea, am in the third and youngest branch of the tree, I have no claim on the Morton estate; neither would Thea have, if I could find the missing link in the first and oldest branch, that of Octavia, who was married in Port Rush, Ireland, to Mr. McMahon, and had twins, Augustus Octavius, and Octavia Augusta. You see she, too, was classically inclined, like her father. Well, Augustus Octavius died, and Octavia Augusta married Henry Gale, a hatter, in Leamington, England, and emigrated to America in 18—, and settled in New York, where all trace of her is lost. Nor can I by any possible means find anything about her, except that Henry Gale died, but whether he left children I do not know. Presumably he did, and their descendants would be the real heirs to the Morton property, if that clause holds good. Do you see the point? or, as Thea would say, do you tumble?”

He repeated his question in a louder tone, as I did not answer him, but sat staring at the unfinished branch of the Hepburn tree. I did tumble nearly off the seat, and only kept myself from doing so entirely by clutching Aleck’s arm and holding it so tightly that he winced a little as he moved away from me, and said: “What’s the matter? Has something stung you?”

“No,” I replied, with a gasp, and a feeling that I was choking, or fainting, or both.

I had followed him closely through Agrippina’s line, and had felt a little bored when he began on Octavia’s, but only for an instant, and then I was all attention, and felt my blood prickling in my veins and saw rings of fire dancing before my eyes, as I glanced at the names, as familiar to me as old friends.

“Aleck,” I whispered, for I could not speak aloud, “these are all my ancestors, I am sure, for do you think it possible for two Octavias and two McMahons to have been married in Port Rush and had twins whom they called Octavia Augusta and Augustus Octavius, and for Augustus to die and Octavia to marry a Mr. Gale, a hatter, in Leamington, and emigrate to New York?”

It was Aleck’s turn now to stare and turn pale, as he exclaimed:

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” I said, “that my great-grandmother’s name was Octavia, but I never heard that it was also Hepburn, or if I did I have forgotten it. I know, though, that she married a McMahon and lived at Port Rush. I know, too, that Mrs. McMahon had twins, whose names were Augustus Octavius and Octavia Augusta. Augustus died, but Octavia, who was my grandmother, first married a Mr. Gale, a hatter, in Leamington, and then came to New York, where he died. She then went to Boston, married Charles Wilson, and moved to New Haven, where my mother, Dorothea Augusta, was born, and where she married my father. I have a record of it in an old English book, which, after my grandmother’s death, was sent to my mother with some other things.”

“Eureka! I have found the missing link, and you are it! Hurrah!” Aleck exclaimed, springing to his feet and catching me up as if I had been a feather’s weight. “I was never more surprised in my life, or glad either. To think here is the link right in Miss Kizzy’s hands! Wouldn’t she have torn her hair if Grant had married Thea? By Jove, it would have been a joke, and a sort of retributive justice, too. I must tell her myself. But first let’s be perfectly sure. You spoke of a record. Do you happen to have it with you?”

“Yes, in my trunk,” I said, and, excusing myself for a few moments, I flew to the house, and soon returned with what had originally been a blank-book and which my grandmother had used for many purposes, such as recording family expenses, names of people who had boarded with her, and when they came, what they paid her, and when they left; dates, too, of various events in her life, together with receipts for cooking; and pinned to the last page was an old yellow sheet of foolscap, with the name of a Leamington bookseller just discernible upon it. On this sheet were records in two or three different handwritings. The first was the birth in Leamington of Augustus Octavius and Octavia Augusta, children of Patrick and Octavia McMahon, who were married in Port Rush, April 10th, 18—. Then followed the death of Augustus and the marriage of Octavia to William Gale, of Leamington. Then, in my grandmother’s handwriting, the death of Mr. Gale in New York, followed by a masculine hand, presumably that of my grandfather, Charles Wilson, who married Mrs. Octavia Gale in Boston, and to whom my mother, Dorothea Augusta, was born in New Haven. I remember perfectly well seeing my mother record the date of her marriage with my father and of my birth on the sheet of foolscap after it came to her with the other papers from my grandmother, but when or why it was pinned into the blank-book I could not tell. I only knew it was there, and that I had kept the book, which I now handed to Aleck, whose face wore a puzzled look as, opening it at random, he began to read a receipt for ginger snaps.

“What the dickens has this to do with Cæsar Augustus and Augustus Cæsar?” he asked, while I showed him the sheet of paper, which he read very attentively twice, and compared with his family tree. “You are the Link, and no mistake!” he said. “Everything fits to a T, as far as my tree goes. Of course it will have to be proven, but that is easily done by beginning at this end and working back to where the branch failed to connect. And now I am going to tell Miss Morton and Grant. Will you come with me?”

“No,” I replied, feeling that I had not strength to walk to the house.

I was so confused and stunned and weak that I could only sit still and think of nothing until Grant’s arms were around me and he was covering my face with kisses and calling me his darling.

“Aleck has told us the strangest story,” he said, “and I am so glad for you, and glad that I asked you to be my wife before I heard it, as you know it is yourself I want, and not what you may or may not bring me. Aunt Kizzy is in an awful collapse,—fainted dead away when she heard it.”

“Oh, Grant, how could you leave her and come to me?” I asked, reproachfully, and he replied, “Because I could do no good. There were Aunts Dizzy and Brier, and Thea, and Aleck, and Vine, all throwing water and camphor and vinegar in her face, until she looked like a drowned rat. So I came out and left them.”

“But I must go to her,” I said, and with Grant’s arm around me I went slowly to the house and into the room where Aunt Kizzy lay among her pillows, with an expression on her face such as I had never seen before. It was not anger, but rather one of intense relief, as if the tension of years had given way and left every nerve quivering from the long strain, but painless and restful. Thea was fanning her; Aunt Brier was bathing her forehead with cologne; Aunt Dizzy was arranging her false piece, which was somewhat awry; while Aleck was still energetically explaining his family tree and comparing it with the paper I had given him. At sight of me Aunt Kizzy’s eyes grew blacker than their wont, while something like a smile flitted across her face as she said, “This is a strange story I have heard, and it will of course have to be proved.”

“A task I take upon myself,” Aleck interrupted, and she went on to catechise me rather sharply with regard to my ancestors.

“It is strange that your father did not find it out, if he saw this paper.”

“He did not see it, for it was not sent to us until after his death,” I said, while Aunt Dizzy rejoined, “And if he had it would have conveyed no meaning to him, as I do not suppose he ever troubled himself to trace the Hepburn line to its beginning or knew that Mrs. McMahon was a Hepburn. I have no idea what my great-grandmother’s name was before she was married. For me, I need no confirmation whatever, but accept Doris as I have always accepted her, a dear little girl whose coming to us has brought a blessing with it, and although I am very fond of Thea, and should have loved her as Grant’s wife, I am still very glad it is to be Doris.”

She was standing by me now, with her hand on my shoulder, while Aunt Brier and Thea both came to my side, the latter throwing her arms around my neck and saying, “And I am glad it is Doris, and that the Hepburn line is torn into shreds. I believe I hate that old Amos, who, by the way, is as much your ancestor as mine, for we are cousins, you know.”

She kissed me lovingly, and, putting my hand in Aunt Kizzy’s, said to her, “Aren’t you glad it is Doris?”

Then Aunt Kizzy did a most extraordinary thing for her. She drew me close to her and cried like a child.

“Yes,” she said, “I am glad it is Doris, and sorry that I have been so hard with everybody, first with Beriah, and then with Gerold, whom I loved as if he had been my own son, and who it seems married into the Hepburn line and I did not know it. And I have loved you, too, Doris, more than you guess, notwithstanding I have seemed so cross and cold and crabbed. I have been a monomaniac on the subject of the Hepburn lease. Can you forgive me?”

I could easily answer that question, for with her first kind word all the ill feeling I had ever cherished against her was swept away, and, putting my face to hers, I kissed her more than once, in token of peace between us.

That afternoon Aleck started North with his family tree and my family record, and, beginning at the date of my mother’s marriage, worked backward until the branch which had been broken with the Gales in New York was united with the Wilsons of New Haven, “making a beautiful whole,” as he wrote in a letter to Thea, who was to me like a dear sister, and who, with her perfect tact, treated Grant as if they had never been more to each other than friends. Those were very happy days which followed, and now, instead of being the least, I think I am the most considered of all in the household, and in her grave way Aunt Kizzy pets me more than any one else, except, of course, Grant, whose love grows stronger every day, until I sometimes tremble with fear lest my happiness may not last. We are to be married at Christmas time, and are going abroad, and whether I shall ever write again in this journal I cannot tell. Years hence I may perhaps look at it and think how foolish I was ever to have kept it at all. There is Grant calling me to try a new wheel he has bought for me, and I must go. I can ride a wheel now, or do anything I like, and Aunt Kizzy does not object. But I don’t think I care to do many things, and, except to please Grant, I do not care much for a wheel, being still, as Thea says, something of a softie.

CHAPTER XIII.—Aunt Desire’s Story.
THE THREE BRIDES.

I am too old now to commence a diary; but the house is so lonely with only Keziah and myself in it that I must do something, and so I will record briefly the events of the last few weeks, or rather months, since the astounding disclosure that Doris and not Thea was the direct heir in the Hepburn line. Nothing ever broke Keziah up like that, transforming her whole nature and making her quite like other people and so fond of Doris that she could scarcely bear to have her out of sight a moment, and when Grant and Doris were married and gone she cried like a baby, although some of her tears, let us hope, were for Beriah, who will not come back to live with us again, while Doris will.

And right here let me speak of Beriah’s little romance, which has ended so happily. Years ago she loved Tom Atkins, but Kizzy separated them, in the hope that Brier would marry John Haynes, of the Hepburn line, as possibly she might have done, for she was mortally afraid of Kizzy. But John had the good taste to die, and Brier remained in single blessedness until she was past forty, when Tom, who she supposed was dead, turned up unexpectedly in Cairo. Grant, who was there at the time, made his acquaintance and brought a message from him to Brier, who, after receiving it, never seemed herself, but sat for hours with her hands folded and a look on her face as if listening or waiting for some one, who came at last.

It was in November, and the maple-leaves were drifting down in great piles of scarlet in the park, and in the woods there was the sound of dropping nuts, and on the hills a smoky light, telling of “the melancholy days, the saddest of the year.” But with us there was anything but sadness, for two brides-elect were in the house, Doris and Thea, who were to be married at Christmas, and whose trousseaus were making in Frankfort and Versailles. Thea had expressed a wish to be married at Morton Park on the same day with Doris, and, as her guardian did not object, she was staying with us altogether, while Aleck came every day. So we had a good deal of love-making, and the doors which used to be shut promptly at half-past nine were left open for the young people, who, in different parts of the grounds, or piazza, told over and over again the old story which, no matter how many times it is told, is ever new to her who hears and him who tells it.

One morning when Aleck came as usual, he said to Grant, “By the way, do you remember that chap, half Arab and half American, whom we met in Cairo? Atkins was the name. Well, he arrived at the hotel last night, with that wild-eyed little girl and two Arabian servants, one for him, one for the child. He used to know some of your people, and is coming this morning to call, with his little girl, who is not bad-looking in her English dress.”

We had just come from breakfast, and were sitting on the piazza, Grant with Doris, and Brier with that preoccupied look on her face which it had worn so long. But her expression changed suddenly as Aleck talked, and it seemed to me I could see the years roll off from her, leaving her young again; and she was certainly very pretty when two hours later, in her gray serge gown with its trimmings of navy blue, and her brown hair, just tinged with white, waving softly around her forehead, she went down to meet Tom Atkins, from whom she parted more than twenty years ago. We had him to lunch and we had him to dinner, and we had him finally almost as much as we did Aleck, and I could scarcely walk in any direction that I did not see a pair of lovers, half hidden by shrub or tree.

“‘Pears like dey’s a love-makin’ from mornin’ till night, an’ de ole ones is wuss dan de young,” I heard Adam say to Vine, and I fully concurred with him, for, as if he would make up for lost time, Tom could not go near Brier without taking her hand or putting his arm around her.

Just what he said to her of the past I know not, except that he told her of dreary wanderings in foreign lands, of utter indifference as to whether he lived or died, until in Athens he met a pretty Greek, whom, under a sudden impulse, he made his wife, and who died when their little Zaidee was born, twelve years ago. After that he spent most of his time in Egypt, where he has a palatial home near Alexandria, with at least a dozen servants. Last winter he chanced to meet Grant at Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo, and, learning from him that Beriah was still unmarried, he decided to come home, and, if he found her as unchanged in her feelings as he was, he would ask her a second time to be his wife. So he came, and the vows of old were renewed, and little Zaidee stayed with us altogether, so as to get acquainted with her new mamma that was to be. She is a shy, timid child, who has been thrown mostly with Arabs and Egyptians, but she is very affectionate, and her love for Beriah was touching in its intensity.

When Thea heard of the engagement she begged for a triple wedding, and carried her point, as she usually does. “A blow-out, too,” she said she wanted, as she should never marry but once, and a blow-out we had, with four hundred invitations, and people from Cincinnati, Lexington, Louisville, Frankfort, and Versailles. There were lanterns on all the trees in the park, and fireworks on the lawn, and two bands in different parts of the grounds, and the place looked the next morning as if a cyclone or the battle of Gettysburg had swept over it. The brides were lovely, although Doris, of course, bore off the palm for beauty, but Thea was exceedingly pretty, while Beriah reminded me of a Madonna, she looked so sweet and saintly, as she stood by Tom, who, the moment the ceremony was over, just took her in his arms and hugged her before us all. Zaidee was her bridesmaid, while Kizzy was Doris’s and I was Thea’s, and in my cream-colored silk looked, they said, nearly as young as the girls.

The next morning the newly married people left en route for Europe, and the last we heard from them they were at Brindisi, waiting for the Hydaspes, which was to take them to Alexandria. Doris will come back to live with us again in the autumn, but Brier never, and when I think of that, and remember all she was to me, and her patience and gentleness and unselfishness, there is a bitter pain in my heart, and my tears fall so fast that I have blurred this sheet so that no one but myself can read it. I am glad she has Tom at last, although her going from us makes me so lonely and sad and brings back the dreary past and all I lost when Henry died. But some time, and that not very far in the future, I shall meet my love, dead now so many years that, counting by them I am old, but, reckoned by my feelings, I am still young as he was when he died, and as he will be when he welcomes me inside the gate of the celestial city, and says to me in the voice I remember so well, “I am waiting for you, darling, and now come rest awhile before I show you some of the glories of the heavenly world, and the people who are here, Douglas, and Maria, and Gerold, and all the rest who loved you on earth, and who love you still with a more perfect love, because born of the Master whose name is love eternal.”

CHAPTER XIV.—Doris’s Story.
TWO YEARS LATER.

It is just two years since that triple wedding, when six people were made as happy as it is possible to be in this world, Aunt Brier and Mr. Atkins, Aleck and Thea, and Grant and myself, on whom no shadow has fallen since I became Grant’s wife and basked in the fullness of his love, which grows stronger and more tender as the days go on. He is now studying hard in a law office in town, determined to fit himself for something useful, and if possible atone for the selfish, useless life he led before we were married. We spent a year abroad, going everywhere with Aleck and Thea, and staying a few weeks in Mr. Atkins’s elegant villa near Alexandria, where everything is done in the most luxurious and Oriental manner, and Aunt Brier was a very queen among her subjects. When the year of travel was ended we came back to Morton Park, where a royal welcome awaited us, and where Aunt Kizzy took me in her arms and cried over me a little and then led me to my room, or rather rooms, one of which was the Glory Hole, which had been fitted up as a boudoir, or dressing-room, while the large, airy chamber adjacent, where Thea used to sleep, had also been thoroughly repaired and refurnished, and was given to us in place of Grant’s old room.

And here this Christmas morning I am finishing my journal, in which I have recorded so much of my life,—more, in fact, than I care to read. I wish I had left out a good deal about Aunt Kizzy. She is greatly changed from the grim woman who held me at arm’s length when I first came from school, and of whom I stood in fear. We have talked that all over, and made it up, and every day she gives me some new proof of her affection. But the greatest transformation in her came some weeks ago, with the advent of a little boy, who is sleeping in his crib, with a yellow-turbaned negress keeping watch over him. Aunt Kizzy calls herself his grandmother, and tends him more, if possible, than the nurse. Grant laments that it is not a girl, so as to bear some one or two of the queer names of its ancestors. But I am glad it is a boy, and next Sunday it will be christened Gerold Douglas, for my father and grandfather, and Aleck and Thea will stand for it. They have bought a beautiful place a little out of town and have settled down into a regular Darby and Joan, wholly satisfied with each Other and lacking nothing to make them perfectly happy. Aunt Brier and Mr. Atkins are also here, staying in the house until spring, when they will build on a part of the Morton estate which Mr. Atkins has bought of Grant. Oriental life did not suit Aunt Brier, and, as her slightest wish is sacred to her husband, he has brought her to her old home, where, when Aleck and Thea are with us, we make a very merry party, talking of all we have seen in Europe, and sometimes of the Hepburn line, which Aleck says I straightened,—always insisting, however, that it did not need straightening, and that the obnoxious clause in the lease would never have stood the test of the law. Whether it would or not, I do not know, as we have never inquired.