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