“How I should like to see her!” exclaimed Blanche.
“We have photographs at home,” said Stuart. “I think them lovely, but mother and the others who remember her say they do not do her justice.”
“We have some very good ones here,” said Aunt Wealthy, “and everyone who cares to look at them can do so.”
They were leaving the table as she spoke and Blanche, speaking aside to Stuart, urged him to ask his aunt to show them the old-fashioned treasures in her parlor of which she had heard him and Percy tell.
“Yes, dearest, I will,” he said with a mirthful look. “I own to a great desire to see them myself, having heard so much about them from mother, grandma, and Aunt Mildred.”
But there was no need to prefer the request, as it was to the parlor Miss Stanhope now led the way, and she was presently exhibiting with pardonable pride the old furniture that had been in the family since before her time, her grandmother’s sampler framed and hanging on the wall, the embroidered chair cushions which she said were filled with that grandmother’s own feathers, and were valued by herself more than their weight in gold, though much faded and somewhat worn in spite of the excellent care she had always taken of them—the old, old portraits on the walls, the cabinet of curiosities brought from over the seas by an ancestor who had been a sea captain.
All these were examined with interest, then Percy enquired for the photographs.
“Ah, they are here,” replied Miss Stanhope, taking up a photographic album and handing it to him. “Let us see if you can pick out your Cousin Elsie.”
“Easily,” he returned, “since I have often seen one in mother’s possession;” and as he opened the album his wife, Blanche, and Stuart drew around him to gaze with eager curiosity upon the lovely face which he pronounced an excellent likeness of Mrs. Travilla, judging from those he had seen and the description of her often given him by the members of the family who knew her.
Our little bridal party spent some days at Lansdale, then urgent messages from home hurried them away. They reached Pleasant Plains about the middle of the afternoon of another lovely June day.