One glance, and she turned to him, her eyes full, her features working with emotion.
“Mother!” was the one word that came low and gaspingly from the quivering lips.
His face was a study, the gratified pride of the artist mingling with the tender sympathy of the lover.
He drew her arm within his, for she was trembling like an aspen leaf.
She allowed him to support her while she turned again to the picture and studied it with mournful pleasure.
Mrs. Kemper’s face was a peculiar one, and had changed but little during the fifteen quiet, uneventful years of her life in Cranley. This picture of Espy’s—painted from memory—represented her as he had first seen her, with the little Ethel by her side dressed as she was then, and holding her doll in her arms. The pretty baby-face was as perfect a likeness as the other. Memory had done him good service here also, and, in addition, he had had the assistance of a photograph taken about that time.
A second painting hung by the side of the first—a full-length portrait of our heroine standing on the threshold of her Cranley home, as Espy had seen her on looking back after bidding her good-by when leaving for college the last time before the accident that wrought such woe to the young, light-hearted girl whose pathway had been hitherto so bright and sunny.
It was a speaking likeness of a very lovely face, fair and winning, with the freshness of early youth and the sweetness and vivacity lent it by a keen intellect and a happy, loving heart. The figure and attitude were the perfection of symmetry and grace.
It received many a lingering look of admiration from strangers, but a single glance was all that Ethel bestowed upon it.