“Which one is Mother going to give me?”

“I don’t know. She aren’t going to give ’em to us until our wedding days. Of course, Janet didn’t get hers on her wedding day because she got married out here in Blackhawk County before we come, but Mother’ll give it to her to-morrow when we get there.”

“Go on . . . you’re forgetting the end of the story.”

“Oh, well, you know it anyway. When Father got back to Liverpool he heard all about the money and the property being lost, and the things being sold, and he never even went to Aberdeen but sent for Mother and all five of us children to come to Liverpool and we all crossed the ocean. I were seven and I can remember just as well . . . and when we got to New York, you were born.”

Abbie breathed a sigh of relief. It was a welcome respite after a narrow escape. With every telling of the story, almost it seemed for a time that she was not to be born.

“Now tell about the painting of Isabelle Anders-Mackenzie that hung on the landing of the stairway in the great hall.” Abbie rolled the magic words from her lips in delicious anticipation. This was the part she liked the best of all.

“Well . . . it were beauteous. It were in a great heavy gold frame . . . and as big as life. I can remember it just as well. In the picture she were young, you know . . .”

“And beautiful . . .” prompted Abbie.

“And beautiful. She had reddish-brown hair like yours . . . and she were standing by a kind-of . . . a table-thing, and she had on a velvet dress that swept down and around her . . . and she had a hat in her hand with a plume . . .”

“A flowing white plume,” corrected Abbie.

“A flowing white plume,” repeated the more matter-of-fact Isabelle. “And she had pretty hands and long slender fingers that tapered at the ends.”

Abbie held her hands up to the opening of the canvas on the wagon and peered at them in the moonlight. The fingers were long and slender and they tapered at the ends. She sighed with satisfaction, and slipped them under the old patched quilt.

“And nobody knows what become of the picture?” It was half statement, half question, as though from the vast fund of information which Isabelle possessed, she might, some day, suddenly remember what had become of the picture.

“No. It were sold at the roup. I don’t know who got it.”

Abbie sighed again, but not with satisfaction. Of all the beautiful things that were sold, she felt that she could have missed seeing any of them with better grace than the portrait. In her immature way, she resented the sale more than any other thing,—the passing of the lovely lady into other hands. Jewels, money, furniture,—they seemed lifeless, inanimate things beside the picture of the woman who was flesh of her flesh. It ought to have been saved. It was their own grandmother who stood there forever inside the heavy gold frame, in the dark velvet dress that swept around her,—and with the flowing white plume—and the long slender fingers that tapered at the ends.