“Well, of all the rummy old chaps!” exclaimed Alfred.
“Oh, he’s touched of course,” said Stephen, tapping his head. “He must be. You know old Adam said he’s always pretty bad at this time of the year. I suppose it is the anniversary of something. But, Barbara, what do you mean by going and stirring up memories?”
“It wasn’t I; it was my name,” replied Barbara. “Once there was a girl named Barbara, but the rest of the story can never be written, because he won’t tell what it is.”
“Let’s have a peep at the house before we go,” said Jimmie, “and then let’s eat. I’m starving.”
“All right,” said Stephen. “Step right in and have a look for yourselves, but hurry up before the old gentleman comes back.”
The place was certainly comfortable and cosy-looking, in spite of the wooden walls and bare floors. It was spick and span and clean, kept that way by Adam’s wife, Stephen explained. There were a great many books, some of them in foreign languages, two big easy-chairs near the open fireplace, and on an old mahogany table, the only other piece of furniture in the room, a brown earthenware jar filled with honeysuckle. Only one picture hung on the wall, a small miniature suspended from a nail just over the pot of flowers. Ruth examined the picture closely. Besides his books, she thought, this little miniature was perhaps the only link with the outer world that the old man had permitted himself to keep.
“Come here, everybody, quick,” she called, “and look at this miniature. As I live, it’s enough like Bab to be a picture of her, except for the old-fashioned dress and long ringlets.”
They looked at the picture carefully, taking it down from its nail in order to see it in the light.
“My word!” exclaimed Jimmie. “It’s as good a likeness as you could wish to find. It must have been the resemblance that gave the old man the fit, then, and not the name.”
The miniature showed the face of a young girl, somewhat older than Barbara, but certainly very like her in features and expression. She had the same laughing mouth and frank, brown eyes, the same chestnut hair curling in crisp ringlets around the forehead, but caught up loosely in the back in a net and tied with a velvet snood. She wore a bodice of rose-colored taffeta cut low in the neck, and fastened coquettishly among the curls was a pink flower.