“To whom am I indebted for this honor? That funny little old ambrotype! Where did you unearth it, Lucretia?”
“It was Brother William’s,” Lucretia explained, with her gentle melancholy. “Mark found it in his room and asked me about it.”
Mark looked to see some revelation in Miss Allison Clyde’s face, but found none. Her kindly smile had not faded or changed except to take on a shade of amusement as she picked up the ambrotype.
“How proud I was of that mantilla!” she said. “I remember it so well. It was green. Do you recall it, Lucretia?”
Miss Lucretia nodded, her frail hands busy with the tea-cups.
“I do. And the turban with the green plume you wore with it.”
Mark glanced from the picture of the child to the face of the woman whose youth was past. Was it tragedy for her, he wondered, that she had never known in its fullness the meaning of love and home? Or was she happy burning with her own diffusing light full of the warmth of humanity, loving, and giving to all the world instead of one lover?
Miss Lucretia interrupted his reverie.
“I suppose you are going over to see Stella this evening, and we old people shall have to amuse ourselves without you as best we can.”
Mark lifted his Lowestoft tea-cup and set it down again before he answered slowly: