“Oh, is this really the place? I never dreamed it was so grand and lovely. And how could he afford it? He has told me so much that I must be economical, now father has failed.”
She said frankly what she thought, and Kenneth watched her admiringly, contrasting her with Connie and giving the latter the preference, of course. He knew Connie was to be at the villa with his father and mother, and as the carriage entered the gate he saw her standing on the steps, looking like some fair lily in her white gown and blue ribbons, with a single rose in her belt.
“That’s Connie, I know, and she’s Paris all over. I shall like her,” Kitty said, springing from the carriage the moment it stopped and going up to the group waiting for her. “I don’t need to be introduced. I know this is Aunt Mary, and this Uncle Ephraim, and this Connie; may I call you that?” she said, kissing each in turn, and holding Connie’s hand as she continued: “I didn’t know about you until Kenneth told me, and I am glad that you are here and that baby has your name. Funny, isn’t it? And Harry didn’t know you either.”
They were all around the baby now, and Connie, who loved children dearly, took it in her arms and held its soft face against her own and thought she saw in it a likeness to something she had seen, and wondered why that bowlder among the Alps should come up to torment her when she was going to be so happy with Kitty and the baby. It did not take Kitty long to explain, as well as she could, why her husband was not with her. He would come within a week, surely, and then they would all be so happy. She was older than Connie, but seemed younger, she was so small, and she flitted about the house like a humming bird, delighted with everything and especially with Connie, who, she insisted, should stay altogether at the villa until her husband came.
“And Dr. Kenneth, too, if he will, and Aunt Mary and Uncle Ephraim, I want you all,” she said, in her soft Southern voice, with a bit of foreign accent in it. “You can stay, and we will worship the baby together.”
She seemed to think the baby the centre of interest, as it was, but no one took to it as readily as Connie, who spent the night at the villa, and who, after the baby was undressed, rocked it to sleep, and then sat a long time looking into its little face and wondering whose features she saw so plainly mirrored there.
CHAPTER XV
THE PHOTOGRAPH
The days passed rapidly, and Connie and Kitty, as they called each other, seemed to have become one personality, so fast their friendship grew. Connie spent the most of her time at the villa, where the baby was the great attraction. For hours she would hold it, studying its features, and sometimes seeming almost to get a glimpse of something she had seen like them; then the likeness would fade into a mist, leaving her as puzzled as ever.
“She is like Harry,” Kitty said to her one day when she sat with the baby in her lap, “and he is the handsomest man you ever saw. Dr. Kenneth is grand and splendid, and makes you feel that there is a power there for great and noble things,—self-sacrifice, I mean, and all that. Harry is different. I love him dearly, but I don’t believe he would give up as much as Dr. Kenneth. He always gets his way, he is so persuasive, and his eyes and voice talk. He was very kind to me when he heard father had lost everything and could not send me the allowance I’d always had. ‘Served me right,’ he said. I didn’t know what he meant, unless he had married me for my money. When I asked him he kissed me and said I was all the world to him. He told me though, before we were married, that he had once loved a beautiful girl, and when I asked, ‘Why didn’t you marry her?’ he said, ‘Because I wanted you.’ Nice, wasn’t it? I have often wondered who that girl was, and wanted to ask him, but think perhaps I’d better not. Would you?”
“No,” Connie answered, mechanically, as she poked the baby’s chin trying to make it laugh.