But Arethusa could find no fault with it. She admired it unaffectedly as they went up the walk toward it.
"Do you live here, Father?" she asked, breathlessly. She had considered at first the possibility that it might be a hotel. "It's so awfully big! Why, Father, it's every bit as big as our County Court House!" Which was till now the largest building she had ever seen.
She regarded the stately proportions of the facade with awe. Had she not been with her father, she would never have found the courage to lift that shining knocker in the center of the broad paneled door. She would have gone on past this place, she was sure; it seemed so much too large for the family of two she had come to visit.
Elinor's loving impatience had taken her to the library windows more than once to watch for their coming. It seemed so long that Ross had been gone. When the automobile was heard to stop, she rushed to the front door to open it herself, flinging it wide as a hospitable indication of how glad she was to welcome Arethusa. But with her hand still on the door knob, she paused and drew back. This tall, slim child, every bit as tall as she was herself, with her ardent grey eyes, and that mass of tumbled red hair down her back, for Arethusa's various exciting experiences had been hard for the coiffure with which she had started from home, was not the girl Elinor had led herself to expect as Ross's daughter. Arethusa, furthermore, was bareheaded, having forgotten all about her hat and left it in the machine. This, as well as the quaint costume of Miss Letitia's designing, added to Elinor's little feeling of surprise.
And Arethusa stopped short also, just inside the door, and shyness descended upon her once more with this, her first glimpse of the "new wife."
But whatever Elinor's expression might be said to resemble, Arethusa's in return after that first look was one of absolute and unalloyed admiration. In her wildest flights of anticipatory imaginings as to the appearance of her father's wife, founded on that Letter of his that had so positively indicated her beauty, Arethusa had never been able to paint such a picture as she actually saw. For Elinor's young brown eyes, under her white hair, the lovely glow of her skin, and her slender gracefulness clothed in that clinging, fascinatingly smoky-colored gown she wore (a color she much affected), seemed to the beauty worshipper who regarded her to make her the most Altogether Beautiful Human Being that she, Arethusa, had ever gazed upon.
"Well," remarked Ross; he thought the funny little silence had lasted quite long enough, "I hope you two will know each other the next time you happen to meet anywhere!"
Then was Elinor given one of those same disarming smiles with which Arethusa had won her father in the automobile, and anything else but immediate and complete friendship was impossible after such a Smile, however unlike the girl expected the one who had come might be.
Clay had brought in the forgotten hat when he came with the satchel, and he hovered about in the background of the hall until he could communicate to Ross that Miss Arethusa's trunk had not been attended to. Should he go right straight back for it? Clay was somewhat used to the remembering of things which Ross had not remembered; rarely a day passed that he did not have to do something of this kind.
"My trunk!" Arethusa's mind made a complete somersault at this intrusion of so commonplace an article into the happy family greetings and the joy of finding Elinor as dear as she looked. "I ... I forgot all about it!" she faltered.