Wythie crossed over to the chest without a word, and knelt to unfasten it. Then she threw back its lid, and looked up at Basil.
"There isn't much to see, but it has always seemed to me that there was much to feel in this chest," she said.
An odour of attar of roses, of lavender, of tonka beans, blended into an indefinable, sweet mustiness by more than a hundred years, arose into the young faces bent to inhale it. Soft muslins, fine with the fineness of the importations from India when broad-sailed merchantmen went out from New England ports, yellow with age, and daintily wrought with broidery, lay neatly folded before their eyes.
Beneath them, as Oswyth the second tenderly raised them, lay high-heeled, narrow slippers, a fan that had been brought from China long ago to the happy young girl whose cheeks' tint matched its mandarin's crimson robe, a white silk shawl that might have come with the fan, its knotted silken fringe and heavily embroidered flowers several shades more yellow than the delicate fabric. Neckerchiefs of soft mull, white and in colours lay there, ribbons, stained and faded by the years, a sampler, a bead bag, clocked stockings, and a great leghorn hat with its plumes and gauze ribbons flattened by long lying. It was a young girl's chest, and its pathos spoke to Basil, the pathos of a light heart that early had ceased to beat, of brief life and long death.
Wythie lifted, one after the other, that other Oswyth's treasures, and at last raised from its box near the bottom of the chest the beautiful brocade which she wished to wear in the gavotte. Beneath it lay bed-linen, hemmed with the tiniest stitches, and table-linen with its "O. G." carefully wrought in its corners. And underneath all, in the very bottom, lay a few thin books, and a bundle of letters tied with a yellowed ribbon that might once have been either white or pale blue, and marked in the finest of old-fashioned writing: "From B. R. to O. G. Her all of life."
"B. R.?" exclaimed Basil. "Am I in this story, too, Wythie?"
"I never thought of those initials before," said Wythie, flushing to the uppermost line of her brow, "I have not opened this chest, not for ever so long—three years, it may be."
"You couldn't have thought of the initials then, Wythie, dear; I wasn't in your story as long ago as that," said Basil.
"I remember that Oswyth Grey's lover's name was Benjamin Raymond," said Wythie. "Poor little greatest aunt—they are sad letters!"