"Elizabeth would be proud to have you for a relation, Judidy," Grandfather said, gravely. This time Elizabeth saw the sharp glance that appraised her, and she turned quickly toward Judidy.
"Anybody would be proud to have a—a cousin with such a lovely complexion," something urged her to say.
"Don't!" Judidy protested. "I'm all tanned up."
"I have a friend in New York, Jean Forsyth," Elizabeth said, presently, "whose sister married a count."
"And when you get back to New York, you can tell her all about your cousin Samuel," her grandfather twinkled. "My, what good times you can have, comparing notes."
"Father!" said Grandmother Swift, warningly. "You run along upstairs, Elizabeth, and I'll come up there as soon's I take one more swaller o' coffee. I got something I want to say when there ain't no men-folks about."
Upstairs again, Elizabeth took the photograph of a deep-eyed girl in a silver frame out of the drawer in her wardrobe trunk and gazed at it with gathering woe.
"Oh, dear, Jeanie," she said, "the only thing that would make me any less miserable in these surroundings would be to sit down and write you just exactly how things are, and that I can never do."
"You come with me," her grandmother called suddenly from the threshold. "I got an idea."
She led the way past the landing and tiny hall into which the steep stairway debouched, into the regions in the rear of the three bedrooms that Elizabeth was familiar with. There seemed to be a chain of small, stuffy rooms dimly stored with old furniture and boxes, and not all on the same level, and beyond them a low room, with a slanting roof, half chamber, half hallway.