“It grows at Stewart’s. It has been woven into a lovely, soft-falling silk, at four dollars a yard. Twenty-five yards makes a gown, and eight yards of velvet makes the trimming and the sleeveless jacket, and the velvet is six dollars a yard. And then there is Madame Bodin, she charges like a horrid old Jew,—forty dollars just to look at a gown; and then there are the linings and buttons and things. Have you kept account, papa, and added it all up in your head?”
“I think it means about two hundred dollars. Isn’t that what you call it, Sylly?”
“Yes, if you please. It’ll be worth that, won’t it, to have your daughter look like a love, when all the people come on New Year’s Day?”
“So that’s it,—that’s what this conspiracy against my peace and my pocket has for its object,—that Miss Syl Graham may sit at the receipt of callers on New Year’s Day, in a robe like a red, red rose. O Sylly, Sylly!”
Syl pouted a little, the most becoming pout in the world.
“Well, I’m sure I thought you cared how I look. If you don’t, never mind. My old black silk is still very neat and decent.”
“September, October, November,—it’s nearly three months old, isn’t it? What a well-behaved gown it must be to have kept neat and decent so long! And as to the other, I’ll consider, and you can ask me again when I come home to-morrow.”
Syl knew what Papa Graham’s considers meant, and how they always ended. She had gained her point, and she danced off and sang to the piano some old Scotch airs that her father loved, because Syl’s mother used to sing them; and Papa Graham listened dreamily to the music, while his thoughts went back twenty years, to the first winter when he brought his girl-bride home, only a year older, then, than Syl was now. He remembered how the firelight used to shine on her fair, upturned face, as she knelt beside him; how sweet her voice was; how pure and true and fond her innocent young heart. And now Syl was all he had left of her.
Should he lose Syl herself, soon? Would some bold wooer come and carry her away, and leave him with only Aunt Rachel’s quiet figure and fading face beside him for the rest of his life?
Just then Syl might have asked him not in vain for any thing, even to the half of his kingdom.