Setting down the lamp, Hubert, his fingers trembling with eagerness, unfastened the picture, and, turning it, read upon the back: "Hazel Le Mesurier, aged five years, 1671."
Thus it was that the Le Mesurier girl came to be named Hazel.
At five years of age a painting was made of her head and shoulders, in like pose, on the same sized canvas as that of her namesake, and, behold, the two faces, allowing for the dissimilarities of style arising from the difference of the schools of painting of so remote a period from those of the present time, were as like, one to the other, as two—hazelnuts!
When his daughter had attained to her ninth year, Hubert Le Mesurier fell ill and died, being then in the forty-fifth year of his age.
The twenty-and-odd years of his majority had been one hard struggle to redeem the heavily mortgaged estate inherited from a spendthrift father and grandfather. His endeavours ended in failure; he had speculated deeply for many years, keeping his fortunes, with few fluctuations, at the same dreary level. On his demise came the inevitable crash: the foreclosure of the mortgage. Other debts there were; so that, when Helen and her eldest boy, Guy, of some nineteen or twenty years, who, having the ordering of these things, had quieted and pacified even the loudest crying among their creditors, and were once more enabled to breathe freely, now that so heavy a burden as debt was removed from the delicate shoulders of the mother and the youthful ones of the son—so inapposite a load for either to bear—they found the great house a very barrack in its echoing bareness, being, indeed, divested of many things.
Heavy oak furniture, some dating from Queen Anne's time, covered in decent palls, was moved away in vans down the gloomy avenue of great trees, with funeral gait. Also much valuable plate and almost priceless china.
But the mourners who had sustained this loss were left rejoicing in that the portrait gallery, sacred to the Le Mesuriers, doubly sacred to Helen as her husband's dying trust, was left inviolate; and as the poor thing stood, surrounded by her five sons, in the huge marble-paved entrance hall, she exclaimed, tears of very thankfulness coursing down her cheeks:
"Why should we grieve while we have each other? While together we can protect what my Hubert, what your father held so dear."
Each Le Mesurier boy, in varied pose of heroic resolve, protested his loyalty and devotion to his father's memory, and to the honoured name of ancient lineage which he bore; and each Le Mesurier boy's heart beat strong and fast according to the stage of development in which his inherent pride of race had found expression and proportionally to the valorous and chivalric feeling that stirred in the depth of each affectionate Le Mesurier boy's nature toward his lady mother.
Hazel, with outspread skirts, gravely danced, twirled and pirouetted with light, quick feet in the background; but on hearing the tears in her mother's voice, with a little caressing cry she flew to Helen's side, flung her arms about her and, looking up into her face, cried: