Her alert eyes marked the Sugar Creek pictures at one end of a shelf built against the window, but from his position at the moment she had surprised him in his brooding she knew that he had not been studying them. Nor did these new prints from old plates present likenesses of Montgomery's heroes of the sixties; but there were three—a little quaint by reason of the costumes—of a child, a girl of fourteen, and a young woman; and no second glance was necessary to confirm her instant impression that these represented her mother—the mother of whom she had no memory whatever. There were photographs and a miniature of her mother at home, and at times she had dreamed over them; and there was a portrait done by an itinerant artist which hung in her Uncle Amzi's house, but this, her Aunt Josephine had once told her, did not in the least resemble Lois.
Kirkwood tried clumsily to hide the prints.
"No; Phil, please don't!" he exclaimed harshly.
"Of course, I may see them, daddy,—of course!"
He allowed her to take them from him.
"It's mamma," said Phil. "How dear they are!" she murmured softly.
As she turned the prints to catch the dimming light, he watched her, standing inertly with his elbow on the shelf.
"Isn't it odd that I never saw any of these! even Uncle Amy hasn't them."
She bent over the print of the child, who stood with a hoop, smiling as though in delight at her belated rescue from oblivion.
"You were going to give these to me, weren't you, daddy?" She was running over the others. One that showed the mature woman in a fur cape long out of fashion and with a fur cap perched on her head, held her longest.