Prime dropped both paddle and knife.
"Well—wouldn't that jar you!" he exclaimed. "Can it be possible that—hold on a minute; my grandfather had a Bankhead cousin who grew up in the family, and she married and moved to Ohio, away along back in the other century. What was your grandmother's Christian name?"
"It was an old-fashioned one—Lorinda. I can remember her indistinctly as a little old lady with white hair and the brightest possible blue eyes."
Prime was wagging his head as one in a daze. "It is too wonderful to be true, Lucetta! But it must be true. My grandfather's cousin's name was Lorinda, and I can remember seeing an oil portrait of her, a horrible thing done by some local artist, hanging in the old farmhouse at Batavia. I can't figure it out, but the way it is working around, we ought to be cousins of some sort. Can you believe it?"
The young woman put her mending aside to trace the relationship thoughtfully, counting the generations on her finger-tips. When she had finally determined to her own satisfaction that they really had a common ancestor four generations back, she laughed.
"It is wonderful," she said; "almost too wonderful to be true. But the wonder of it is completely overshadowed by the unbelievable coincidence which dropped us two, cousins and descendants of that far-away Bankhead, down together on the beach of a forest lake in the wilds of the Canadian backwoods—a lake that neither of us ever saw or heard of before. Will the mysteries never end?"
"Wait a minute; let's get it straight," Prime interposed. "We are really cousins, aren't we? Don't you figure it out that way?"
"Third cousins; yes."
"You'll have to show me," he invited. "Genealogy is like Sanskrit to me."
She proceeded to show him, and from that the talk drifted rather excitedly into family reminiscences. After the manner of people who really have ancestors, neither of them was able to remember many of the traditions. Prime's recollections, indeed, stopped short with his grandfather, but Lucetta knew a little more about the older generations, and she dug the individuals out one by one, offering them to Prime as spurs to further rememberings.