"Your mother is a dear!" she replied, and her voice was convincing—"and I like your father. He's very good looking. And the breakfast was—well it was like one of your stories—Do you always have steak and doughnuts for breakfast?"
"No," I replied, "not always, but breakfast is a real meal with us."
The sky darkened and a sleety rain set in during the forenoon, but mother did not mind the gloom outside, for within she had her daughter. Upon our return to the sitting room, she led Zulime out into the kitchen to take account of all that was going on for dinner, and while the maids, with excited faces stood about waiting for orders from their new boss, Zulime laughingly protested that she had no wish to interfere. "Go on in your own way," she said.
To me, on her return to the sitting room, she exclaimed: "You should see the food in preparation out there! Enough to feed all the Eagle's Nest campers.—How many are coming to dinner?"
"No one but the McClintocks—and only a few of them," I soberly replied. "Uncle William and Aunt Maria, Frank and Lorette—and Deborah, all old people now. I don't know of any one else." In fact, we had less than this number, for Maria was not well enough to come out in the rain.
Our circle was small, but the spirit of Thanksgiving was over it, and when I saw my stately city wife sitting among my rough-hewn relations, listening to the quaint stories of Uncle Frank, or laughing at the humorous sallies of Aunt Lorette, I wondered what they thought of her. She made a lovely picture, and all—even caustic Deborah—capitulated to her kindliness and charm. If she had failed of complete comprehension and sympathy I could not have blamed her, but to have her perfectly at home among these men and women of the vanishing Border displayed her in a new and noble guise.
If anything was lacking—any least quality of adaptation, it was supplied when, that evening, my uncles and my father discovered that Zulime could not only read music, but that she could play all the old songs which they loved to have me sing. This accomplishment completed their conquest, for under her deft hands the piano revived the wistful melodies of Minnie Minturn, Maggie, and Nellie Wildwood, and when my mother's voice, sweet as ever, but weak and hesitant, joined with mine in singing for our guests, I was both glad and sad, glad of my young wife, sad with a realization of my mother's weakness and age.
She did not reproach me for not bringing the daughter sooner. She had but one regret. "I wish Frank was here," she said, her thought going out to her other son.
How far away, how remote, how tender that evening seems to me after more than twenty years work and travel! To Zulime it unrolled like a scene from one of my novels, to me it was the closing, fading picture of an era, the end of an epoch, the passing of a race, for the Garlands and McClintocks, warriors of the western conquest, representatives of a heroic generation were even then basking in the light of a dying camp-fire, recounting the deeds of brave days gone.
When we were again alone in my study, Zulime said, "I'm going to enjoy it here. I like your people, and I hope they liked me."