"Why, that woman and another man lifted me out of the boat and took me somewhere—and I stayed there a hundred hours—and then the boat was gone—and another boat come along (but it wasn't the Gwand Wapids), and we got on it and my mama thes cried and cried and cried. Wasn't that funny that she cried when we had got away? But she didn't put me down with the fwogs and the turkles! She held me tight and tight and tight." The recollection of that sweet embrace was too much for him.
"Unker Wichard—"
With a child all roads lead to Rome. The story ended as the others had—"Where's my ma-a-ma?"
When Richard De Jarnette got back to his library he felt as if he had had a nerve tapped. If this was to continue indefinitely he would became a driveling imbecile. The plaint had such a haunting, piteous ring!
As he was turning over the papers on the library table his hand accidentally encountered the picture Bess had given him. He took it up and looked at it.
It was Margaret at her best. The roundness of curve belonging to young womanhood was still there, but when he thought of her as a bride it seemed to him that this face had in it a subtle something that the bride's face did not have. Maternity had deepened the shadows around the eyes, and care—inseparable from maternity—had added lines here and there that would never be retouched. The mouth was firmer than he remembered his sister-in-law's to have been. He recalled how like a child's that mouth had been the day he told her Victor was gone.
It was a rare face, in contour and in character. He smiled to think how faces, like figures, could lie. Yes, a beautiful face, but not one especially to stir a man. It was pure madonna. A pair of chubby arms were clasped about her neck, and to her softly rounded cheek was pressed a baby face—so like her own—and yet to Richard's eyes so like another baby face that he remembered well. The picture was good of Philip now, though it must have been taken—well, perhaps—
He turned the picture over to look for a possible date.
"For Grandma Pennybacker,"
it said in Margaret's writing, and then