“Aunt Dahlia, dearie,” Nan exclaimed a few moments later, as she embraced the older lady, “here at last is my room-mate, Phyllis. You are the two whom I most love, and I have so wanted you to know each other.”
“And you look just exactly as I knew you would from all our Nan has told me about you. Just as sweet and pretty.”
Miss Dahlia’s kind face did not reveal that she was even a day older than she had been that Thanksgiving nearly four years before.
Nan asked about Miss Barrington, the elder and was told, that, as usual, she was busy with clubs of many kinds. “We are very unlike, my sister, and I,” the little lady explained to Phyllis, “I like a quiet home life, Ursula is never happier than when she is addressing a large audience of women, and it does not in the least fluster her if there are men among them, on weighty questions of the day. Yes, we are very unlike.”
“I am glad that you are.” Nan nestled lovingly close to the little old lady. “Not but that I greatly admire and truly do care for Aunt Ursula. She has been very kind to me since she began to like me.” Nan laughed, then stopped as though she had been about to say something she ought not, as indeed she had been. She had nearly said that her Aunt Ursula had started to really like her when she felt that the girl had been properly civilized and Christianized, for, ever since the talk she had had with Robert Widdemere, Nan had really tried in every way to accept the religion of the gorigo.
“Aunt Dahlia,” she suddenly exclaimed, “what do you suppose is going to happen? The music master has offered a medal of gold to the one of us whose rendering of a certain piece, which he has selected, shall please him the most at our coming recital. Phyllis is trying for it on the violin; Muriel Metcalf and I on the harp, and Esther Willis on the piano. I do hope you and Aunt Ursula will be able to come.”
“Nothing but illness could keep me away,” Miss Dahlia said as she rose to go.
CHAPTER XVII.
OLD MEMORIES REVIVED.
The two girls with arms about each other stood on the front veranda watching as Miss Dahlia was being driven along the circling drive. Nan knew that she would turn and wave at the gate. A moment later she saw the fluttering of a small white handkerchief. The girls waved their hands, then turned indoors and climbed the wide, softly carpeted stairway and entered the room which they shared together.
It was a strange room for each girl had decked her half of it as best suited her taste. On one side the birds’ eye maple furniture was made even daintier with blue and white ruffled coverings. There was a crinkly blue and white bedspread with pillow shams to match, while on the dresser there was an array of dainty ivory and blue toilet articles, two ivory frames containing the photographs of Phyllis’ father and mother, and a small book bound in blue leather in which she wrote the events of every day. There were a few forget-me-nots in a slender, silver glass vase, and indeed, everything on that side of the room suggested the dainty little maid who occupied it.