“A little,” Dorothea answered. “Of course I was very small when she died, but I can still recollect a dear face that bent over me before I went to sleep at night. Even now I see it sometimes, just as I am going off. One of the things I want most was to have you tell me about her. Father says hardly anything—it hurts him to think about it, I know, because I can always see a shadow come over his face when I mention my mother. So I do not like to make his heart ache. But, oh, Aunt Parthenia, I have longed for some one to talk to who remembers her. She was very pretty, wasn’t she? Does this look like her?”
On her wrist Dorothea wore a gold clasp mounted on a red velvet ribbon, and opening this case she showed it to her aunt.
Mrs. May gazed at the picture, her eyes growing soft in her recollection of the girlish face she saw, and for a moment or two there was silence in the room.
“It is very like her, dear,” she said finally. “Very like her, indeed. She was just as sweet and pretty as this painting shows her to be.”
“That is how I think of her,” Dorothea remarked. “And that is the face I see sometimes in my dreams. But I am never sure whether it is my real mother or the remembrance of the picture that I see. Yet, somehow, I have felt sure she was like that and it is a comfort to me to have the picture with me. It makes her seem nearer to me.”
“Do you always wear it on your wrist?” asked Mrs. May.
“Always,” answered Dorothea. “Father told me red was her favorite color, so I have a supply of red ribbons to mount it on. And, you know, Aunt Parthenia, except for father, who gave it to me, you are the only one who has seen it. At school lots of the girls wondered what was in the locket, but, somehow, I never wanted to tell them. It was as if mother and I had that little picture between us and it wasn’t a thing you could show to strangers. You think I’m right, don’t you?”
“I am sure you are, dear, if it gives you any comfort,” Mrs. May answered earnestly.
“Well, it does,” Dorothea went on. “You see, for a while I was at boarding-school and father was all alone. Then he wanted me with him, for mother’s sake mostly, I think, and ever since we have been living first in one place and then in another, all over the world. It’s been very interesting, but it has never been like home; for of course I rarely stayed anywhere long enough to make any real friends. That is one of the reasons why I wanted so much to see you and my cousins. That, and to talk to you of mother.”
“And to find a real home, Dorothea,” Mrs. May murmured, patting the girl’s hand. “Hereafter, no matter what happens, there is always a place for you here, and the girls will soon be like your sisters.”