III

The next afternoon at tea-time he took the daguerreotype to his Aunt Lucretia. She received it with her slow, uncertain, frail old hands, lifting it to the light.

“Why, that little old picture of Allison!” she said. “I had forgotten we had it. Where did you find it? It was William’s.” She stared at it with the pitiful look the eyes of the old show at reawakening memories. “I always thought your Uncle William was in love with her,” she confided, “although he never told us so.”

“Miss Allison Clyde?” Mark questioned, and Miss Lucretia nodded faintly, marveling:

“Why, didn’t you know!”

“And was Miss Allison in love with Uncle William?”

Miss Lucretia answered doubtfully:

“I don’t know. She was a child. She never said so.”

“Did she ever, later on, have a love-affair?”

His aunt shook her head.

“Not that I know of. She was always so taken up with her own household. They were very close to each other, a very united family.”

“It is a wonderful little face,” Mark said, looking down at the daguerreotype.

“She was only a child then,” Lucretia repeated, “not more than fifteen.” Her eyes became reminiscent. “She was still so young, only seventeen, when he died. When he came home, he knew he had not long to live. He used to sit out here and watch her as she moved about. He never talked much, but the look in his eyes was,” Aunt Lucretia stated in her quiet way, “very moving.”

Mark heard a step, and glanced up to see Miss Allison Clyde herself standing beside them, looking down at them with a smile.

“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:

“No, I think not. I am going to stay and have some music with Miss Allison.”

He wondered why Miss Allison had made Stella seem suddenly hard, new, almost crude, like the modern furniture in the drawing-room beside the fine old mahogany, with its simple decoration and tone of time.

It was that evening, which he had decided should be his last, that, when their music was over, he handed Miss Allison Clyde a sheet of manuscript music.

“Since you liked it,” he said.

She took it, a faint color coming in her cheek. It was the manuscript of the fifth song of his cycle, “Evening,” and he had dedicated it to her. Involuntarily she moved to give it back to him.

“No, not to me. You are too kind. But you must dedicate it to youth.”

He nodded, with his smile.

“So I have: to the woman who has youth in her heart.” Then he drew out the package of letters. “And these,” he said in a lower voice, “are yours also.” He handed them to her silently.

“Mine?” She turned over the package in doubtful wonder.

“I found them in the desk with the daguerreotype. When you open them you will understand.”

Turning from the doorway for a last good night, Mark saw Miss Allison, as he always afterward remembered her, standing by the tall mantel in the candle-light with the unopened package of Uncle William’s letters in her hand.