“Can it be,” said Frank, “that these were ever our pictures? I hope, Mrs. Tyrrell, the originals had the forethought to put the names on the back, that we may be able to identify them.”
“No,” said she, “we must guess as best we can. First, who is that?” pointing to one of the figures.
“That must be Mrs. Hyde, for she is taller than the others,” suggested Grandma Fellows.
“By the same token, that must be Mrs. Tyrrell, for she is shorter,” said Jessie; “though, but for that, I don't see how we could have told them apart.”
“How oddly they did dress in those days!” said Mary.
“Who can that be?” asked Frank, pointing to the finest-looking of the three young men. “If that is one of us, there was more choice in our looks than there is now,—eh, Townsley?”
“No doubt,” said George, “fifty years ago somebody's eye scanned those features with a very keen sense of proprietorship. What a queer feeling it would have given those young things to have anticipated that we should ever puzzle over their identities in this way!”
They finally agreed on the identity of Jessie, Nellie, and Frank, and of George also, on his assuring them that he was once of slender figure. This left two figures which nobody could recognize, though Jessie insisted that the gentleman was Henry, and Mary thought the other young lady was a Miss Fellows, a girl of the village, who, she explained, had died young many, many years ago.
“Don't you remember her?” she asked them, and her voice trembled with a half-genuine sort of self-pity, as if, for a moment, she imagined herself her own ghost.
“I recall her well,” said Frank; “tall, grave, sweet, I remember she used to realize to me the abstraction of moral beauty when we were studying Paley together.”