He found the ladies there, sitting together, gazing out upon the lovely landscape—the verdant valley, the clear waters of the swiftly flowing river, and the woods clad in the deep green of their summer robes. Violet was speaking in low, feeling tones, Mary listening evidently with intense interest. Violet had been telling of scenes and occurrences described in “Elsie’s girlhood”—the time when Arthur, in a fury of passion because she refused to advance him money without her father’s knowledge and consent, even went so far as to strike her, and was immediately soundly thrashed for it by Mr. Travilla; the time when Jackson, her discarded lover, discarded at first in obedience to her father’s command, afterward loathed by her when she had learned for herself that he was a villain of deepest dye instead of the honorable, virtuous man she had formerly esteemed him, came so unexpectedly upon her there, sitting alone and undefended, and with a loaded pistol threatened her life unless she would promise never to marry Mr. Travilla; but now Violet’s theme was her father’s confession of his love, and her mother’s glad surprise—the sweet story told to her by that mother herself since the dear father’s death.
“Mamma told it to me after I had heard the same sweet story from the lips of my own dear husband,” were the words that reached the captain’s ear as he stepped into the arbor, and as she turned at the sound their eyes met with a look of love as ardent and intense as any ever bestowed by either one upon the other: they were as truly lovers now as they had been five years before.
“Excuse me, ladies,” he said with a bow and smile, “I do not wish to intrude, and will go away at once if my company is not desired.”
“It is no intrusion, I am sure,” was the reply of Miss Keith, while Violet said with a look of pleasure: “We are only too glad to have you with us, my dear. You have come in the nick of time, for I have just finished my story, which, though new to cousin, would have been old to you.”
She made room for him by her side as she spoke. He took the offered seat, and they talked for a little of the lovely grounds and the beauty of the view from that point; then rose and walked back to the house, conversing as they went.
Violet led the way to the grassy lawn upon which opened the glass doors of what had been in former years her mother’s sitting-room, and through them into the room itself.
“This and the dressing and bed rooms beyond were mamma’s apartments while living here,” she said, “and loving his eldest sister as he does, Uncle Horace has kept them furnished all these years almost precisely as they were when she occupied them.”
“I should think he would,” said Mary Keith, sending keenly interested and admiring glances from side to side; “it is all so lovely that I should not want to change a single thing, even if I did not care to keep them just so in remembrance of her, as I certainly should.”
Mr. Horace Dinsmore, Jr., came in at that instant.