In Cousin Penelope’s wake, for she did not quite dare to walk at her side, as she had walked with Aunt Eunice, Caroline went down to the dining room.

To feel as she felt on entering that cool, orderly room, with its white paint and dark paper, its old portraits and its severe, highly polished dark furniture, you would need to have lived for six months with Cousin Delia, whose dining room furniture was all of golden oak, carved in endless curves and curlicues, and who kept a piece of fly-paper on the golden oak sideboard, between the blue glass lemonade set and the plated silver cake dish.

With a sense almost of going to church, Caroline slipped into the place at the table to which Aunt Eunice smilingly motioned her. There was no cloth on the table, just drawn-work doilies of sheer white linen, and on the largest doily in the center was a crystal bowl with pale small roses. The glasses were almost as thin as soap-bubbles, and the silver was thin, and highly polished, and plain. All this Caroline had noted in the first instant, and in the second she noted with relief that there was no butler after all, only the good-humored maid, Sallie. Then she took courage, and decided that, even though there were several knives and forks and spoons at her place, she would be all right if she began at each end and worked inward.

Probably in all her life Caroline had never eaten a meal that tasted so good as that first dinner at The Chimnies. There was a clear, well-flavored soup, in a deep plate covered with Chinese figures in lettuce green and raspberry pink. With the soup were little golden-hued dice which were like glorified bread crumbs. Then there were slices of pink ham, with fat as white as marble, amber brown balls of potato, delicate small peas, a crisp salad of lettuce and ice cold cucumber, with pale, firm cheese and salty toasted crackers, and last of all little tarts of fresh strawberries, topped with whipped cream.

Caroline ate, silently and earnestly. She had eaten her last three meals, remember, out of a shoe box.

Very early, with the soup, Aunt Eunice asked her if she would like a glass of milk.

“Yes, please, thank you,” said Caroline, “if it isn’t too much trouble.”

After that, conversation so far as concerned Caroline, ceased to exist. She ate, and was glad that no one noticed her, or so she thought. But someone must have noticed her, it seemed. For when Caroline was half through her little tart, eating in careful small bites, as her mother had taught her, and holding her fork nicely, Cousin Penelope spoke out of a clear sky.

“She really favors our side of the family, doesn’t she, Mother?”

“Jacqueline?”

“Yes. The resemblance is striking. Just look at Great-aunt Joanna Gildersleeve.”

For the life of her Caroline couldn’t help looking round, in the direction in which Aunt Eunice and Cousin Penelope both were looking. She half expected to see another great-aunt standing right at her elbow. But instead she only saw, hanging upon the wall above the sideboard, the portrait of a rather forbidding lady in a cap, with a curtain parting on a landscape just behind her.

“I don’t quite see the likeness,” murmured Aunt Eunice.

“It’s something in the inner curve of the eyebrow and the set of the nostrils,” Cousin Penelope explained patiently. “It’s almost indefinable but quite unmistakable.”

Aunt Eunice did not dispute the point. Neither, you may be sure, did Caroline.

When dinner was over they went into a large, square room that opened off the dining room. All round the room were shelves of books in many-colored bindings, and there was a great writing-table across the western window. There was a fireplace, masked with an old-fashioned fire-screen on which a landscape was worked in faded silks, and above the fireplace was a marble mantel on which were a pair of bronze vases. But there was no piano!

Caroline sat down in a low chair, which Aunt Eunice recommended to her, and wished that she had Mildred in her arms. She began to feel very much alone, with these people who were really not her people, and a little bit frightened. Older folk than Caroline have felt that way, in a strange place, among strange faces, with the day ending, and no way of knowing what the next day may bring.

Sallie brought in a tray, with matches and a spirit-lamp, a canister that savored of rich coffee-berries, a little glass coffee machine, half filled with crystal clear hot water, two cups, thin as egg-shells, and small almost as eggs.

Aunt Eunice put the machine together, measured the coffee, as if she performed a religious ceremony, and set the lamp beneath the globe of water.

“Of course you don’t take coffee, my dear,” she spoke kindly to Caroline. “Go look in the drawer of the table over there. I think you’ll find a box of candied ginger. Help yourself!”

Caroline took courage, as she saw Aunt Eunice smile.

“If you don’t mind,” she whispered, “I’d rather—have you a piano?”

She felt that Cousin Penelope, cool and aloof in her chair by the window, looked at her, surprised and not altogether pleased.

“Of course, dear,” said Aunt Eunice readily. “Right across the hall in the long parlor. You can find your way?”

“Oh, yes,” Caroline nodded hastily.

She wanted to get to the piano quickly, before Cousin Penelope interfered. For she felt that Cousin Penelope was sitting up very straight and about to speak.

“Run along!” said Aunt Eunice. Did she, too, feel that Penelope was rising to remark?

Caroline “ran along.” She went so fast that she was almost out of earshot when Penelope expressed herself:

“Mother! That child—strumming on my piano!”

“She won’t hurt the piano fatally, my dear,” said Aunt Eunice, placidly but with unexpected firmness. “Poor little shy thing! She’s lonely and homesick, as any one can see, and if the piano gives her pleasure to-night, who would begrudge it?”

No one, evidently, while Aunt Eunice was around. Penelope sank back in her chair, but there was a little crease, not at all becoming, in her high white forehead.

Meantime Caroline had “found her way,” easily enough, across the hall and into the long parlor, which was as long as the book room and the dining room put together. Such a big room, with pictures that frowned on her through the twilight that was deepening, here on the east side of the house. But neither the bigness of the room, nor the dimness of it could daunt Caroline, for at the farther end she saw the polished bulk of a grand piano.

She flew to it across the dark polished floor and the dusky rugs. There had been no piano at Cousin Delia’s, only a talking machine. Cousin Delia liked a fox trot or a coon song as well as the next one.

Caroline sat down on the piano bench. She poised her hands for a second over the white keys, almost afraid to touch them lest they melt away and vanish. Then very softly but firmly she struck a chord, and another, and another. How the piano sang in its deep, golden throat! Such a piano as her precious Muzzy had dreamed of having some time for their very own! Caroline struck more chords, and ran a scale to limber her little fingers, which had grown the least bit stiff with lack of exercise.

“The dear little thing!” cooed Aunt Eunice over her coffee machine. “If she isn’t practicing her scales.”

She cast an appealing look at Penelope, but Penelope in the window looked unplacated.

Caroline found the pedals with her feet. She could just reach them. She could make the piano talk, now loud, now low. She played very softly a lullaby that her mother had made up, just for her—a very simple thing—one of the first that she had ever learned. The stiffness was going from her fingers. She and this beautiful, wonder working, deep throated piano were friends. She began to play the last thing that her mother had taught her, a rhapsody of Brahms.

In the library Aunt Eunice paused in her placid sipping of her coffee, and looked amazed, for Penelope had sat up in her chair, with a quick, passionate movement that was not like Penelope.

“Mother!” There was something like awe in Penelope’s voice. “That child can play.”

“Quite so, dear.”

“But it isn’t parrot-playing, Mother—there’s more than her funny little bit of ragged technique—there’s feeling—listen now!”

They listened, while their coffee cooled. Full, round golden notes sang through the old dim house, now loud, now low. Night winds blew—bells tolled—echoes wakened in a vast cathedral aisle beneath a myriad jewel-like stained windows.

“Why, Penelope! Don’t!” Aunt Eunice soothed suddenly, as if the Penelope who swallowed her hard sobs was again a little child.

“I can’t help it, Mother. Don’t you see? There is something after all in the power of the soul. That Delane woman—that horsy, tangoing California girl——”

“Penelope!”

“She’s dead, I know. I shouldn’t speak like that. But she had no music in her, and Jack hadn’t a note of it. But I—I——”

“Yes, dear.”

“Jack was my favorite cousin,” Penelope whispered. “You know how much I cared for him. Even when that Delane girl took him away. And now Jack’s child—my music is in her—and by that much she’s mine, not hers,—she’s mine!”