“Allison Clyde?” he repeated. He remembered the name vaguely as one of some old friend of the family. “An old lady.” He had not reckoned his indifferent label a question, but his aunt took it up.
“We never think of her as that. She is younger,” Lucretia Hall conceded, “than I am. Allison is universally admired. Mrs. Herrick”—she quoted the oracle of her circle in that last-generation manner that proclaims the accepted—“says that Allison is a personage.”
Miss Lucretia turned toward the house; her nephew followed her.
“Any relation to the historian, bane of my youth?” he asked.
“His daughter,” Lucretia gladly expounded; “and her brother, the poet, died young. Allison herself—very gifted musically.” The fragments came back to him as his aunt preceded him with her small, hesitating steps up the narrow path. The picture of an old lady playing the “Songs without Words” passed through Mark’s mind, and he began to plan flight. “But she was obliged to give up her music to care for her invalid father.”
“I heard Stella playing,” Mark commented.
His aunt rejoined after a moment:
“She doesn’t seem at all nervous. Young people aren’t in these days. At her age, if any one asked me to play, I was terrified.”
Her nephew smiled down at her, hooking her with an affectionate arm.
“What used you to play, Tante? The ‘Blue Alsatian Mountains’ and the ‘Stéphanie Gavotte’?”