"It is not so very much, after all," replied Mrs. Grahame, after a moment's thought. "I came here once with my father, when I was about ten years old, and stayed two or three days. Miss Hester was already dead; she was the youngest, the beauty of the family, and she was still young when she died. Miss Barbara was the eldest, a tall, slender woman, with a high nose; very kind, but a little stiff and formal. She was the head of the family, and very religious. It was Saturday, I remember, when we came, and she gave me some lovely Chinese ivory toys to play with, which filled the whole horizon for me. But the next morning she took them away, and gave me Baxter's 'Saint's Rest,' which she said I must read all the morning, as I had a cold and could not go to church."
"Poor Mammina!" said Hildegarde.
"Not so poor," said her mother, smiling. "Miss Agatha came to the rescue, and took me up to her room, and let me look in the drawers of a wonderful old cabinet, full of what your dear father used to call 'picknickles and bucknickles.'"
"Oh! I know; I found the cabinet yesterday!" cried Hildegarde in delight. "I had not time to look into it, but it was all drawers; a dark, foreign-looking thing, inlaid with ivory!"
"Yes, that is it," said her mother. "I wonder if the funny things are still in it? Miss Agatha was an invalid, and her room looked as if she lived in it a good deal. She told me Bible stories in her soft, feeble voice, and showed me a very wonderful set of coloured prints illustrating the Old Testament. I remember distinctly that Joseph's coat was striped, red, green, yellow, and blue, like a mattress ticking gone mad, and that the she-bear who came to devour the naughty children was bright pink."
"Oh! delightful!" cried Hildegarde, laughing. "I must try to find those prints."
"She told me, too, about her sister Hester," Mrs. Grahame went on; "how beautiful she was, and how bright and gay and light-hearted. 'She was the sunshine, my dear, and we are the shadow, Barbara and I,' she said. I remember the very words. And then she showed me a picture, a miniature on ivory, of a lovely girl of sixteen, holding a small harp in her arms. She had large grey eyes, I remember, and long fair curls. Dear me! how it all comes back to me, after the long, long years. I can almost see that miniature now. Why—why, Hilda, it had a little look of you; or, rather, you look like it."
The girl flushed rosy red. "I am glad," she said softly. "And she died young, you say? Miss Hester, I mean."
"At twenty-two or three," assented her mother. "It was consumption, I believe. Cousin Wealthy Bond once told me that Hester had some sad love affair, but I know nothing more about it. I do know, however, that Uncle Aytoun (he was the only brother, you know, and spent much of his life at sea), I do know that he was desperately in love with dear Cousin Wealthy herself."
"Oh!" cried Hildegarde. "Poor old gentleman! She couldn't, of course; but I am sorry for him."