Syl Graham was an only child. Her name was Sylvia, but everybody called her Syl, except that sometimes, half playfully and half chidingly, her father called her Sylly. But that was a liberty no one else took,—and for which Mr. Graham himself was not unlikely to pay in extra indulgence.
Syl was seventeen, and she had never known any trouble in all her young, bright life. Her mother had died when she was two years old; and this, which might easily have been the greatest of misfortunes,—though Syl was too young to know it,—had been turned almost into a blessing by the devotion of her father’s sister, Aunt Rachel, who came to take care of the little one then, and had never left her since.
Not the dead Mrs. Graham herself could have been more motherly or more tender than Aunt Rachel; and the girl had grown up like a flower in a shaded nook, on which no rough wind had ever been allowed to breathe.
And a pretty flower she was; so her father thought when she ran into the hall to meet him, as he came in from business at the close of the short November day.
The last rays of daylight just bronzed her chestnut hair. Her face was delicately fair,—as the complexion that goes with such hair usually is,—colorless save in the lips, which seemed as much brighter than other lips as if they had added to their own color all that which was absent from the fair, colorless cheeks. The brown eyes were dancing with pleasant thoughts, the little, girlish figure was wonderfully graceful, and Papa Graham looked down at this fair, sweet maiden with a fond pride, which the sourest critic could hardly have had a heart to condemn.
“Are you cross?” she said laughingly, as she helped him off with his overcoat.
“Very,” he answered, with gravity.
“I mean are you worse than usual? Will you be in the best humor now or after dinner?”