“What?” the girl turned toward him to inquire.
“This!” he took from his pocket a folding kodak, “I wanted to take a picture of you at the top of the trail and I never thought of it until now. Please stand still, there, just where you are, with the fountain back of you and the crysanthemums all around you. Don’t look so serious, Nan. Laugh won’t you? There, I snapped it and you had not even smiled. You had such a sad far away look. What were you thinking.”
“I just happened to think of Little Tirol and how I hope it is all true, that there is a God to care for him and give him another body, one without pain.”
“Dear sister,” the boy said, “you do have such strange and unexpected thoughts. How did you happen to think of Little Tirol now?”
“Perhaps it was because I remembered that day only two months ago, when he and I first came to the garden. The yellow flowers were just beginning to bloom and I wanted one so. I hoped he knows now that I can gather them, a great armful if I wish.” Then the girl skipped toward the house, as she called merrily: “If you were ravenously hungry on the mountain trail, what must you be now, I hope we are not late.”
“There is someone watching us from a front window,” the boy said. “I saw a curtain move. Miss Dahlia would not do that, would she, Nan?”
“I hardly think so. It was probably the maid; though I can’t think what she would be doing in the front room when it must be almost time to serve dinner.”
Robert Widdemere paused a moment at the vine hung outside portal to speak with an old gardener whom he had known since his little boyhood. Nan, singing her joyous bird song without words, climbed the stairs to the library and before she had reached the door she called happily, “Oh Miss Dahlia, Robert Widdemere and I have had such a glorious ride up the mountain road, and too, we climbed to the very summit. Isn’t it wonderful—” she got no farther, for having entered the library she realized that the fashionably dressed stranger standing there was not the little woman whom she so loved.
“Oh, pardon me!” the gypsy girl said. “I thought you were Miss Dahlia.”
“Here I am, dearie,” a trembling voice called as that little lady appeared from the dinning room. “I was needed for one moment in the kitchen,” she explained, then turning toward the stranger she said almost defiantly, “Mrs. Widdemere, this is my dearly loved protege, Nan Barrington. Nan, Robert’s mother has returned unexpectedly from France.”