“I’m quite willing to be possessed, Cousin Helen,” answered Billie. “If I could only see papa sometimes, I think I could say that I never was so gloriously happy in all my life.”
Miss Campbell smiled with pleasure and the girls thought they had never seen her look more beautiful. Her white hair glistened like a bank of snow in the sunshine and her soft eyes were as blue as patches of West Haven Bay on a clear, still morning in summer.
There were times when the lonely spinster looked faded and worn, and at such times she used to shut herself up in her big gray stone house on Cliff Street and refuse to see even her most intimate friends.
“It’s just one of my lonesome moods,” she used to say, “and I would not for worlds inflict myself on innocent people when one is on me.”
But Miss Campbell had not had a single attack of loneliness since Billie had come to live with her. The vigorous, active young girl had awakened the entire household which had run on its steady even course for so many years, and now the place hardly recognized itself, filled with the happy voices and gay laughter of Billie and her friends.
It was an unusual sight for the big mahogany table in the dining room to be loaded with the best cut glass and silver and adorned with delicate lace doilies, which had belonged to Miss Campbell’s grandmother. These thing had been laid away for many years. In the centre of the table was a crystal vase filled with forget-me-nots.
“They are the only flowers I could think of which were the color of your blue birds,” Miss Campbell had explained. “Besides, they are my favorite color. You know, I always wear blue when I don’t wear gray. Sometimes I wear black——”
“Black, Cousin Helen?” repeated Billie. “I didn’t know you ever wore anything so mournful.”
“You shall never see me in it, child, if I can help it. But I have a black dress, only one, and I do wear it at times in my bedroom.”
Some thirty years before Miss Campbell, then a young and beautiful girl, had come to West Haven to live with her grandfather and there she had lived ever since, except for an occasional trip abroad. It was supposed that she had suffered a great sorrow at some time in her life, but the real story had never been known. Captain Campbell, her grandfather, had been a jovial, pleasure loving old man, fond of company and entertaining. He liked to have his beautiful granddaughter stand at his side and receive his guests in a brocaded ball gown, with the famous Campbell diamonds blazing in her hair and the diamond and sapphire necklace around her throat.