A FOUNTAIN SEALED

by

ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK

(Mrs. Basil de Selincourt)

Author of 'The Little French Girl,' 'Franklin Winslow Kane,' 'Tante,' etc.




I


Three people were sitting in a small drawing-room, the windows of which
looked out upon a wintry Boston street. It was a room rather empty and
undecorated, but the idea of austerity was banished by a temperature
so nearly tropical. There were rows of books on white shelves, a pale
Donatello cast on the wall, and two fine bronze vases filled with roses on
the mantelpiece. Over the roses hung a portrait in oils, very sleek and
very accurate, of a commanding old gentleman in uniform, painted by a
well-known German painter, and all about the room were photographs of young
women, most of them young mothers, with smooth heads and earnest faces,
holding babies. Outside, the snow was heaped high along the pavements
and thickly ridged the roofs and lintels. After the blizzard the sun was
shining and all the white glittered. The national colors, to a patriotic
imagination, were pleasingly represented by the red, white and blue of the
brick houses, the snow, and the vivid sky above.