Nothing further during the subsequent brief exchange of notes between Miss Lowrie and Linda was said of the latter's intention to visit her father's family. Mrs. Feldt, however, whose attitude toward Linda had been negatively polite, now displayed an animosity carefully hidden from her husband but evident to the two girls. The elder never neglected an opportunity to emphasize Linda's selfishness or make her personality seem ridiculous. But this Linda ignored from her wide sense of the inconsequence of most things.

Yet she was relieved when, finally, she had actually left New York. She looked forward with an unusual hopeful curiosity to the Lowries. To her surprise their house—miles, it appeared, from the center of the city—was directly on a paved street with electric cars, unpretentious stores and very humble dwellings nearby. Back from the thoroughfare, however, there were spacious green lawns. The street itself, she saw at once, was old—a highway of gray stone with low aged stone faÇades, steep eaves and blackened chimney-pots reaching, dusty with years, into the farther hilly country.

A gable of the Lowrie house, with a dignified white door, a fanlight of faintly iridescent glass and polished brasses, faced the brick sidewalk, while to the left there was a high board fence and an entrance with a small grille open on a somber reach of garden. A maid in a stiff white cap answered the fall of the knocker; she took Linda's bag; and, in a hall that impressed her by its bareness, Linda was greeted by the Miss Lowrie she had seen.

Her aunt was composed, but there was a perceptible flush on her cheeks, and she said in a rapid voice, after a conventional welcome, “You must meet Elouise at once, before you go up to your room.”

Elouise Lowrie was older than Amelia, but she, too, was slender and erect, with black hair startling in its density on her wasted countenance. Linda noticed a fine ruby on a crooked finger and beautiful rose point lace. “It was good of you,” the elder proceeded, “to come and see two old women. I don't know whether we have more to say or to keep still about. But I, for one, am going to avoid explanations. You are here, a fool could see that you were Bartram's girl, and that is enough for a Lowrie.”

The room was nearly as bare as the hall: in place of the deep carpets of the Feldts' the floor, of dark uneven oak boards, was merely waxed and covered by a rough-looking oval rug. The walls were paneled in white, with white ruffled curtains at small windows; and the furniture, the dull mahogany ranged against the immaculate paint, the rocking-chairs of high slatted walnut and rush bottoms, the slender formality of tables with fluted legs, was dignified but austere. There were some portraits in heavy old gilt—men with florid faces and tied hair, and the delicate replicas of high-breasted women in brocades.

There was, plainly, an air of the exceptional in Amelia Lowrie's conduction of Linda to her room. She waited at the door while the other moved forward to the center of a chamber empty of all the luxury Linda had grown to demand. There was a bed with tall graceful posts supporting a canopy like a frosting of sugar, a solemn set of drawers with a diminutive framed mirror in which she could barely see her shoulders, a small unenclosed brass clock with long exposed weights, and two uninviting painted wooden chairs. This was not, although very nearly, all. Linda's attention was attracted by a framed and long-faded photograph of a young man, bareheaded, with a loosely knotted scarf, a striped blazer and white flannels. His face was thin and sensitive, his lips level, and his eyes gazed with a steady questioning at the observer.

“That was Bartram,” Amelia Lowrie told her; “your father. This was his room.”

She went down almost immediately and left Linda, in a maze of dim emotions, seated on one of the uncomfortable painted chairs. Her father! This was his room; nothing, she realized, had been disturbed. The mirror had held the vaguely unsteady reflection of his face; he had slept under the arched canopy of the bed. She rose and went to a window from which he, too, had looked.

Below her was the garden shut in on its front by the high fence. There was a magnolia-tree, now covered with thick smooth white flowers, and, at the back, low-massed rhododendron with fragile lavender blossoms on a dark glossy foliage. But the space was mainly green and shadowed in tone; while beyond were other gardens, other emerald lawns and magnolia-trees, an ordered succession of tranquillity with separate brick or stone or white dwellings in the lengthening afternoon shadows of vivid maples.

It was as different as possible from all that Linda had known, from the elaborate hotels and gigantic apartment houses, the tropical interiors, of her New York life. She unpacked her bag, putting her gold toilet things on the chest of drawers, precisely arranging in a shallow closet what clothes she had brought, and then, changing, went down to the Lowries.

They surveyed her with eminent approval at a dinner-table lighted only with candles, beside long windows open on a dusk with a glimmer of fireflies. Suddenly Linda felt amazingly at ease; it seemed to her that she had sat here before, with the night flowing gently in over the candle-flames. The conversation, she discovered, never strayed far from the concerns and importance of the Lowrie blood. “My grandmother, Natalie VignÉ,” Elouise informed her, “came with her father to Philadelphia from France, in eighteen hundred and one, at the invitation of Stephen Girard, who was French as well. She married Hallet Lowrie whose mother was a Bartram.

“That, my dear, explains our black hair and good figgers. There never was a lumpy Lowrie. Well, Hallet built this house, or rather enlarged it, for his wife; and it has never been out of the family. Our nephew, Arnaud Hallet—Arnaud was old VignÉ's name—owns it now. Isaac Hallet, you may recall, was suspected of being a Tory; at any rate his brother's descendants, Fanny Rodwell is the only one left, won't speak.”

The placid conversation ran on unchanged throughout dinner and the evening. Linda was relieved by the absence of any questioning; indeed nothing contemporary, she realized, was held to be significant. “I thought Arnaud would be in to-night,” Elouise Lowrie said; “he knew Linda was expected.” No one, however, appeared; and Linda went up early to her room. There, too, were only candles, a pale wavering illumination in which the past, her father, were extraordinarily nearby. A sense of pride was communicated to her by so much that time had been unable to shake. The bed was steeped in the magic of serene traditions.

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