“Is this Mrs. Blossom?” he asked in a thin, brisk voice as she answered his knock on the green-paneled door, where Rose had stood with fluttering heart so few months before. “Then I suppose you are the person who wrote concerning a young girl supposed to be the daughter of Kate Jarvis and James Shannon.”
At that moment he caught sight of Rose. “Bless my heart!” he exclaimed, stepping in. “If there isn’t the child now! Kate’s own daughter; I’d have known her anywhere. The very picture of what her mother was at her age. Bless me!” and he rubbed his thin face, flushed with the chill of the ride from Byfield and wrinkled like a withered apple, with a great white silk handkerchief.
“Turn around to the light, child,” he directed Rose, not heeding Mrs. Blossom’s invitation to lay aside his wraps. “I want to get a good look at you. Yes,” lifting her chin and moving her head from side to side, “clear Jarvis and no mistake—the color of the hair and eyes, the turn of the head and all. I’m thankful you’re no Shannon, though Jim looked well enough as far as that went.
“Dear, dear,” to Mrs. Blossom, “to think that Brother Robert’s daughter, the little Kate I have held on my knee many a time, should be grown and married and dead, and this be her child. It’s difficult, madam, to realize such changes; it makes one feel that he is growing old, upon my word it does.”
Rose, on her part, was looking at him intently. “I believe it is your picture in the locket,” and running upstairs she quickly returned with it open in her hand.
He drew out his eye-glasses. “Yes, that is my picture. Quite a good-looking fellow I was in those days. Kate was my only niece, and I gave her the locket on her eighteenth birthday. And so she always kept it, and you have it still. Well, well!”
“And had my mother an Aunt Sarah?” questioned Rose.
“Yes, her mother’s only sister, Sarah Hartly.”
“I have a Bible she gave my mother, with ‘To Kate from Aunt Sarah,’ written inside.”
“Well,” with a little chuckle, “I’m surprised to know that she ever gave anybody anything.”